


Legacy

by ohmyfae



Series: Imperial!Noct AU [5]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Ardyn raises Noctis AU, Gaslighting, Imperial Noctis AU, M/M, Minor Character Death, Slow Burn, Sort Of, Violence, dad fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-12-07
Packaged: 2019-05-23 10:30:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 34
Words: 80,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14932547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmyfae/pseuds/ohmyfae
Summary: When Noctis was young, his father rescued him from a daemon attack. His father, Ardyn Izunia, chancellor of Niflheim.Determined to prove his worth, Noct throws himself into Ardyn's quest for vengeance, becoming the enforcer of his will. But when their plans bring Noct to the king of Lucis, Noct finds that everything he knows as true is about to change.A rewrite of my Imperial Noctis AU!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a rewritten version of my Imperial!Noctis AU, which started with Father. There will be some considerable changes and additions, but the original isn't going away! I just thought it might be interesting to see where I go with this story a year or so down the line.

Noct’s life began in fire. 

He knew there’d been _something_ before. There were times, when Noct was left alone in his cold, sterile hospital bed, with nothing but beeping monitors and IV drips for company, that he almost felt it. Large hands in his hair, the warmth of an embrace, the vibrating hum of low, fond laughter. A beard that scratched his cheek. Hands playing over the dial of a car radio. He stayed up for hours, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes, but every time he tried to pin a memory down, it faded away into the roar of fire in a dark sky.

Fire, and his father’s back, a broad, stalwart shadow against the light. 

Maybe, Noct thought, as nurses drew his blood and checked his charts without a word, that was why his father had gone so cold. Maybe in that moment, with the wreckage of the car smoldering before him and a daemon at his back, Noct’s father had given himself to the flame. The fire drained everything from him, all his love, all his warmth, even the slight crinkle of his eyes when he smiled, and Noct didn’t have the language to call it back.

After all, Noct had let the monster strike him. He’d… wandered off, maybe, or he hadn’t listened, or he just wasn’t strong enough to take the blow. His father took on a daemon single-handed and came out the other side without so much as a limp, but Noct was still in bed, too weak to move. He tried, straining his screaming muscles every time his father dropped in, trying to prove that he was fine, he was there, he could be _better,_ but it always ended with nurses clucking at the state of his back and doctors staring grimly down at him from a great height. But the worst thing, the thing that made his father’s face twist with displeasure and his voice go cold, was that half the time, he couldn’t even remember his father’s _name._

“Any dizziness?” asked the nurse standing at the foot of his bed. He wore pale, off-white scrubs and an ID card on a black lanyard, and his hair stuck out behind his ears in brown tufts. “Can you give me your name this time?”

“Noctis,” Noct said. His voice sounded like a shoe scraping over gravel. “Noctis Izunia.”

The name felt wrong on his lips. It was like going one step too far over a cliff, wobbling on one leg while the other hovered over a chasm, certain that the wrong move would send him toppling into the dark. Noct caught his breath, and it came to him in short, sudden gasps, swallowed up around the hammering of his heart. 

“Hm,” the nurse said, and marked something down on the clipboard.

“Did I get it wrong?” Noct asked. The nurse turned away, and Noct’s chest squeezed tight, sweat beading on his neck. “ _Did_ I?”

The nurse just walked off, disappearing around the door. Noct tried to breathe, tried to remember _how,_ and found the room swimming, the frosted window of the door blurring and wavering as he stared. Then he heard the click of boots on tile, and a shadow crossed over the fluorescent light. 

“Noctis.” Someone was there. He didn’t recognize the voice, but they were touching his hair, and there was something… familiar, about that. Something right. Noct lifted a hand and felt the folds of an elaborate silk sleeve push at his fingers. 

“Perhaps,” said the man at his side, “when you’re up and about again, it would be best if we moved you to the keep.”

“Dad?” Noct blinked heavily, and got a glimpse of auburn hair, a fine silk hat, eyes narrowed in an expression he couldn’t place. 

“That’s right,” said his father, Ardyn Izunia, baring white teeth in a smile that made Noct shiver. “Don’t fret, my boy. I’ll take you home.”

 

\---

 

Home, Noct learned, was an Imperial keep just on the border of Gralea, echoing with the tramp of MTs and the distant bellow of human officers. Noct couldn’t see much of it from his wheelchair, but what he did see sent a spike of fear down his spine: Rows and rows of airships, shiny and grey and evil, crawling with MTs and engineers. There were mechs with their guts spilling out, wires snapping as people shouted orders to the mechanics standing in their bellies, and big, spiked towers that glowed with a faint red light. Noct kept his head down as he was wheeled off the ramp of his father’s airship and onto the landing dock. 

“Glad to be back, Noct?” his father asked, and he felt the heat of him over his shoulder. 

“Yeah,” Noct said, swallowing a shudder as a squad of MTs marched by. One of them caught his eye as they passed, and for a second, Noct was back in the dark, rooted in place by the fire behind the MT’s expressionless mask.

Even though his father worked directly under the emperor, his rooms at the keep were smaller than Noct thought they’d be. Ardyn’s bedroom was a riot of color, full of strange little figurines and tapestries that Noct was told, in a firm tone, never to touch, but Noct’s room could’ve been a closet. With his bed, wheelchair, crutches, and a small writing desk all crammed together, there was hardly any room left to breathe. 

He lay in silence for what felt like days, staring at the blank, whitewashed walls, before his resolve broke. He slowly dragged himself out of bed, wincing at the pain in his left leg as he put weight on it, and scrambled for his crutches. When he clomped his way out of the bedroom, sweat dripping down his back with the effort, he found his father sitting at a desk, his jacket draped over a chair. 

“Can I…” Noct dragged his lower lip through his teeth as Ardyn turned to him, golden eyes bland. “Sleep on your. On your floor?” There was a long pause, and heat rose to Noct’s cheeks. “Sorry. I’ll go back.”

“It can’t be good for you,” his father said, in a dry tone, and Noct smiled, leaning on his crutches. “But if you must.”

Noct hobbled forward, leaving his crutches at the door so he could roll himself to the foot of Ardyn’s bed. His father looked almost amused at Noct’s attempts to drag down the purple throw from where it draped over his comforter, and Noct watched his back as he turned to his desk once more. He was a lot less bulky without the jacket, Noct realized, and in the dim light of the desklamp, his hair was nearly black. 

“Goodnight,” Noct whispered, and let the image of his father break apart into formless shadow, sinking into the dark.


	2. Chapter 2

“Why, Chancellor. It seems as though you have acquired a second shadow.”

Noct stirred from beneath a row of jackets hanging at the door of the keep’s main council room, scarves tickling his cheeks. After three weeks of exploring their silent, empty rooms, going through the paces of physical therapy with doctors who treated him like a faulty MT, and nodding off before Ardyn could return home, Noct had resolved to get up early, dress, and follow his father through the halls of the keep. He’d lost him early on, but one of the aides near the training yards had pointed him in the right direction, where Noct saw Ardyn’s scarf hanging on a hook and settled down to wait. Now, Ardyn scratched his cheek, scraping over stubble. The man who’d spoken was wearing a captain’s uniform, his blond hair slicked back.

“You’re right,” Ardyn said. “How strange, my shadow isn’t where I left it this morning.”

“Sorry,” Noct said. “I wanted to…” He pushed himself to his feet, and Ardyn reached around him to unhook his scarf. “I thought…”

“You know,” Ardyn said, “ever since I’ve taken on this new post, I _have_ been in need of an assistant.”

Noct straightened. “I can do that,” he said. 

“Really? Do you know how?” Ardyn smiled at Noct’s open-mouthed expression, and leaned down to swipe a hand over his hair. Noct grinned back, a little uncertainly. “Don’t worry. It’s rather like falling off a bike.”

Noct opened his mouth to tell his father that he’d never actually ridden a bike, either, but then, he couldn’t be sure if that was true. Instead, he reverentially took a file of papers from Ardyn and trotted after him, watching the way his coat swayed with his footsteps. When Ardyn entered an office filled with human soldiers sitting around a long metal table, he held out the door for Noct, who ducked under his arm and took up a position behind his chair. Every now and then, some of the soldiers glanced Noct’s way, but their gazes flicked over him, never lingering for long. 

They ate lunch together at the mess hall, but Ardyn mostly picked at his food while Noct carefully tucked all his vegetables under his napkin and tore into the rice. Ardyn got up without a backwards glance, and Noct scrambled after him, panting to keep up. 

They stopped at the training yards, where Ardyn delicately removed his scarf, jacket, and vest, leaving Noct to stagger under the weight of it all, and stepped into the center of a fenced-in circle of hard-packed sand. “I’ll start with twelve today,” he said. A large door at the end of the yard opened, and Noct drew back as twelve MTs lurched into the open, blades out, eyes burning behind their ceramic masks. 

There was a flash of red light, and a sword appeared in Ardyn’s hand. He smiled, wolfish and unfamiliar, and Noct shuddered. 

It was over before Noct could take a breath. His father moved like a daemon over the sand, darting from one target to another in a burst of red light, like fireworks going off in a loose half-circle. MTs collapsed in pieces as he savagely tore into them, his movements economical but brutal in the sheer strength behind the blow. Noct found himself leaning into the fence, hugging Ardyn’s jacket close, as Ardyn stopped beside the last, screeching MT. Ardyn flipped his blade in the air, and before he could catch it by the hilt, it disappeared, turning into a small spear. 

“Twenty,” Ardyn said. “Let’s try and make it a challenge.”

When he was done, he hadn’t even broken a sweat through his white undershirt. Ardyn took his vest and coat from Noct in silence, and as he clasped the buckles and adjusted his cuffs, Noct climbed onto the fence to stare at the MTs sweeping the remains of their fellows away. 

“How’d you do that?” he asked. “The… the light, with your sword? The way you moved?”

Ardyn gave Noct another one of his implacable looks. “It’s our family gift, Noct,” he said. “Or curse, however you’d like to see it. You and I were just going through the basics before your accident, weren’t we?”

Noct clutched the fence post tight. The MTs made long scrapes in the sand, which would need to be swept up before anyone could use the yard again. “I don’t remember,” he said. “You mean I can do that too?”

“If you applied yourself, I suppose,” Ardyn said. He tilted his hat and started off towards the residential part of the keep. “But nothing comes free. You’d need to be in top physical condition in any case—What use is summoning a sword by magic, dear Noctis, if you can’t strike a killing blow?”

Noct trailed after Ardyn, thinking of his own weak arms trembling under the weight of the jacket, his legs still shaky after a day of walking. “How long does it take to get as good as you?”

“Oh, years,” Ardyn said. “Lifetimes.”

Noct tucked his hands in his pockets, looking back over his shoulder at the empty training yards.

That night, Noct slept in his own room. He woke early, rolled out of bed, and tried to remember the way he’d seen human soldiers train in the yards. Pushups seemed easy enough: Even the skinny ones could do them forever, it seemed. Noct got on his hands and knees and slowly, carefully, lowered himself to the floor. 

Ten minutes later, he’d _almost_ managed one. 

Noct threw his shirt down on the floor in disgust and paced the room, fuming. Of course he couldn’t just go from zero to a hundred in a day, but he should have at least made it to two without sweating through his clothes. At least, he thought in relief, digging through his small closet, all his clothes were black. He picked out a new set and snuck into the bathroom, where he stood on his toes to examine his face in the mirror. 

He didn’t really look much like Ardyn. Maybe he took after his mom, wherever she was—Noct had a vague, uneasy memory of looking at a portrait of a woman with his eyes and jawline—but still, there had to be something. He tried to remember the way his father had smiled, before, when Noct hadn’t yet fallen to the daemon. He used to crinkle his eyes up a little, and his cheeks lifted when his lips thinned out like _this…_ Noct held the face for a moment, but it still looked wrong. 

Maybe later, he thought, as he stepped into the shower. Maybe when he was strong enough to take out twenty MTs without even breathing hard, he’d start to see the resemblance. Maybe even Ardyn would, too.

The next few days developed a pattern for Noct. He woke early, worked out until his limbs shook and his muscles ached, took a shower, and examined his face in the mirror for a sign of his father, just in case. Then he gathered up all of Ardyn’s notes from the day before and stuffed them in a binder, which he carried a few steps behind Ardyn at all times, even when Ardyn just sat in an office and went through reports. People took to calling him “Shadow” rather than “Noctis,” smiling at his dark clothes and the close, fervent way he followed at Ardyn’s heels. 

In the afternoon, Noct would sit on the fence and watch his father tear through swathes of MTs and the occasional terrified squad of officers, and Noct would barely make it home before he fell asleep, dropping the binder on his father’s desk and crawling off to bed. 

One evening, after Ardyn had to wake Noct yet again just to have dinner, Ardyn paused before setting down Noct’s bowl of rice and chicken. 

“Noctis,” he said. Noct looked up at him blearily, his eyelids sticky and almost too heavy to open. “You know, you’d be much more awake at this time of day if you _didn’t_ get up at four in the morning to exercise.”

Noct froze. The bowl clinked as it was placed before him, but he didn’t touch it, his hands curled tight in his lap. 

“You aren’t…” he twisted his fingers together. “ _Mad_ about it, are you?”

“Mad?” Ardyn hummed to himself, sitting down at his desk. “Oh, no, I don’t believe so. No, just a little disappointed.” Noct held his breath, and Ardyn smiled down at him, but it was just a curve of the lips, nothing more. “The next time you want to train, ask me first, and I’ll make sure you learn properly.”

Noct sat up, knees bumping into the low table. “You mean you’ll—“

“If you’d like me to, certainly,” Ardyn said. He pulled out a sheet of paper. “I have a free hour before dinner, most days. How does that sound?”

Noct beamed up at him, and Ardyn’s smile in response was thin, small, and just a touch bemused. “Thank you, Dad,” he said. “That sounds _great._ ”


	3. Chapter 3

There were two borders around the imperial keep where Noctis lived: One was made of stone and steel plating, and the doors took four MTs turning enormous metal wheels to open all the way. The second border was just some cheap aluminum stuck to rotting wooden poles, and the path between was overgrown with weeds and wildflowers.

Noct crouched at a gap next to one of the posts, head bowed. He was _supposed_ to be running laps, his father leaning against a pole half a mile away to keep time, but Noct had run out of breath a few minutes ago, and his pockets were stuffed with little blue and white flowers and interesting stones. At his feet, a grey, heavily pregnant cat purred like a motor while Noct scratched under her chin.

"You're gonna have a million kids," Noct said, and the cat tilted her head so he could pet her cheek. "A million billion kids. How can you get through the hole like that?" He crouched down on his heels, and she waddled up to him, rubbing against his knees. "Hey, I love you, too."

"Oh, my heart!" Noct rocked on his heels at the sound of his father's voice, choking with a wretched, painfully fake sob. "My poor weak heart! Broken! My son has been consumed by beasts!"

"I'd better go," Noct whispered, and rubbed the cat's ears one more time for good measure. "Don't have your babies without me!" He raced off, feet thumping in the thick grass, towards the sound of his father having theatrics at the gate.

"What's this I see before me?" Ardyn cried as Noct rounded the corner. "A ghost? It has to be a ghost, because no son of mine would take forty-eight minutes to run one lap unless he were ambushed halfway through."

"Sorry," Noct said, grinning at the way his father's hand flopped on his chest, like he had no strength left. "I ran out of air."

"You did?" Ardyn looked around. "All this air must have disappeared when I wasn't looking..."

" _Dad._ " 

Ardyn looked down at his watch. "One more time, then," he said. "To prove that you are my son, and not some ghoul wearing his clothes. If you aren't at the gates in twenty-six minutes, the doors will close without you. Starting... Now."

Noct yelped and took off, followed closely by the low-throated sound of his father's laugh.

That night, after Noct celebrated finishing his lap in twenty-two minutes by pressing all his flowers in the pages of a book, Noct sat at his father's feet and worked on his maps. It was a strange sort of game his father made up for him, full of little blue Xs that Ardyn lifted up and moved every time Noct's red Os tried to herd them into a gully or a corner somewhere. It was a little maddening, but it was nice when he got to lift up a map with all the X's in neat traps, and his father would smile and wipe the map clean again.

"Father," he said. Ardyn was scrolling through a computer on his desk, which crawled with spiky drawings of buildings and labeled squares. "I have a question."

"It's always nice to have things," Ardyn said, in a dull, uninterested voice. Noct bit down a sigh.

"General Caligo said something about Insomnia at the meeting today," Noct said. Ardyn glanced at him sidelong. "If it's taking so much money just to get in, why are we trying to invade at all? The king seems really angry for some reason, right?" Ardyn nodded. "So leave him alone and he'll stop."

Ardyn closed his laptop. "Oh, Noct," he said. "The king of Lucis is about as stubborn as the emperor. I doubt he'll stop sending troops until all of Insomnia lies empty." He smiled at that, a small, mirthless twitch of his lips. 

"Everyone hates Insomnia," Noct said, and something squeezed in his chest, an ache he couldn't quite name. 

"Noct," Ardyn said, turning his chair around to face him. "Do you know what an oasis is?"

Noct shook his head, and Ardyn tried to explain. After a minute, Noct wrapped his arms around his knees and frowned at his hands, the ache twinging again, dull and insistent.

"So if you think of the world as a desert," Ardyn said, "full of daemons and plague and poverty, and you have Lucis hoarding it's crystal behind a wall so no one else can share the wealth, you can see why it makes some people a little bitter."

"Not you, though," Noct said. Ardyn raised a brow. "You don't sound upset about it."

Ardyn laughed. "A starving man doesn't complain if his steak is overcooked, Noct. Goodness, the last time _I_ was at the city gates, I was dragged out in chains."

" _What?_ " Noct sat up, map crinkling in his hands.

"It was a long time ago," Ardyn said, "and I was very... sick, I suppose. I certainly thought I was dying at the _time._ I used to be something of a doctor, did you know?" There was a light in his eye that made Noct go still, a rabbit in the sights of a fox. "And you can't do the work I did without catching an infection or two. Well, the only thing that could heal me lay in that city, and when I came to them..." He sighed. "It isn't a pleasant story."

"They threw you out?" Noct asked. "Who would--"

"Fear does terrible things to a sheltered population," Ardyn said. "We'll go over that later. And it was the king himself who ordered my banishment, in any case."

Noct looked down at his map, at the Xs slowly encroaching down a valley, and rubbed at his eyes. "No wonder they want to break the wall," he whispered. "Are you still sick?"

Ardyn leaned down to ruffle Noct's hair. "Oh, yes," he said. "And one day it _will_ take me, in time. But don't fret, Noct. It won't happen for a good while yet."

That night, Noct slept on Ardyn's floor again. He wrapped himself up in his blankets and watched Ardyn's chest rise and fall, and thought about how hard he fought, how long he studied and worked and went over plans on his computer, all while a sickness ate away at him from within. And somewhere in Insomnia, beyond a magical wall that took most of the empire's funds just to approach, lay a king who held the cure.

The next day, when Noct ran laps around the border of the keep, he only stopped once.

The cat had long since given birth, dragged her kittens through the gap to let them stumble around piteously, and was adopted by a mechanic from beyond the gate when a summons finally came from the Capital. For a chancellor, Noct overheard someone say in the council room, Ardyn was spending too much time away from Gralea, and the Emperor wanted to see him in person.

"Which means you'll need a crash course in manners," Ardyn said, buttoning up a thick black jacket to Noct's collar. Ardyn was dressed in flower prints and stripes as usual, and a new hat with silk accents. "He isn't Your Majesty, he's Your Radiance. His subjects used to genuflect, but you're not... entirely... Just bow from the waist and you'll do fine. And don't speak unless you're spoken to, of course."

"So just like a council meeting," Noct said. Ardyn smirked.

"Just like."

They took Ardyn's private airship, which had an entire couch nailed down on one side, and Noct jumped onto it as the great engines started to whirl and roar, fire blooming behind his back. The whole ship shuddered as Ardyn sat down in the pilot's seat, his broad back silhouetted against the viewing window. When the ship lifted off at last, Noct squeaked and clutched the couch with both hands.

The actual flight didn't take long. The keep was set at the border of Niflheim, where constant snows gave way to a semblance of spring for half the year, and all they needed to do was fly straight across the canyon to make it to Gralea. Noct got up as they started to descend and stood next to his father, peering down at the network of lights making out city streets and canals.

"It's the biggest place I've seen in my life," Noct said.

"He tries," Ardyn murmured. "Hold on tight, we're in for a bumpy landing."

They were met at the Imperial keep at Gralea by a row of new, heavily armed MTs, and Noct grabbed a handful of Ardyn's jacket as they passed, keeping as much space between himself and the humanoid soldiers as possible. There were lights built into the walls on either side, and men and women running by with grim expressions, their white and grey uniforms pressed and perfect. Noct looked down at his own stark, black clothes and felt heat creep up his neck. 

They were shown to their rooms first, which were bigger than the ones at home, and Noct got the chance to brush his teeth and stick a few pressed flowers from his own bedroom into the frame of the mirror. Then he jumped down from the small step stool by the sink and ran to the door, where Ardyn was waiting for him.

When the door to the Imperial Throne Room slid open, every face within turned towards Noct. Not Ardyn, who strolled ahead with his arms swinging. Noct.

"Your Radiance," Ardyn said, sweeping off his hat in a smooth bow. Noct pattered up beside him and bowed as well, watching him out of the corner of his eye to make sure he was doing it right.

He straightened, and the Emperor was staring at him. The Emperor was older than Noct expected, with tufty white hair and bags under his eyes, but his skin looked healthy, and the eyes that examined Noct were sharp and keen. The Emperor raised a hand, and Ardyn nudged Noct forward. 

"Come here, boy," the Emperor said. Noct felt the gaze of every person in attendance follow him as he crossed the room. There had to be dozens, most of them in military uniforms, all of them his father's age or older, watching him like hawks. He stopped in front of the Emperor, but he was too close to bow, and he twisted round to look at Ardyn.

"It's customary to take a knee," Ardyn whispered.

"What?"

The Emperor took Noct's chin in one bony hand and turned him back around. He looked him over, searching his face, his eyes, lifting his chin to examine the shape of his jaw.

"I can't say I approve," he said at last. Noct clasped his hands to keep from trembling.

"I'm sorry, Your Radiance," he said, in a small voice. "What'd I do wrong?"

The Emperor's brows raised. "Oh," he said. "Oh, dear. No, I was speaking to... your father," he said, with a downward twist of his mouth. "You've been perfectly well-behaved... Noctis?" He glanced over Noct's shoulder. "Isn't that unwise?"

"There's no harm in naming a child Noctis," Ardyn said. "I don't see why some Lucian prince has to have a monopoly on the name, do you, Noct?"

Noct shook his head as much as the Emperor's hand on his chin would allow. The Emperor sighed and released him.

"Go on, then," he said, and Noct raced back to Ardyn, pressing as close to his side as possible. "We'll discuss this at a later time, Chancellor."

"Of course," Ardyn said, with another one of his perfect bows.

Noct let out such a long breath when they finally left the throne room that Ardyn almost laughed.

"You did very well," Ardyn said, "for your first time."

Noct blushed at the praise, turning aside to scratch his neck. "What did he disapprove of, though?"

"He thinks you're too young to visit, that's all," Ardyn said. He strode down the winding hallway, and Noct broke into a jog to keep up. "Since you were so good today, I have a little treat for you. How would you like to see the Imperial armory?"

Noct perked up, grabbing Ardyn's jacket sleeve. "You mean like the swords _you_ have?" He asked. "Can we practice with them?" His fingers itched to hold a blade every time he watched his father in the training yards, but he still wasn't allowed to even touch a _training_ sword.

Ardyn winked. "Not yet," he said. "But I'm sure you'll be ready soon enough."


	4. Chapter 4

Winter set down roots in Niflheim, digging tendrils into the walls of the emperor's keep and making the joints of MT soldiers creak and squeal. Frost formed on windows and threatened to creep down the walls, and Noct, who was standing outside the throne room for the third time since five in the morning, practiced blowing clouds of steam out of his mouth with every breath.

The emperor seemed unhappy with Noct's father. Every now and then, if Noct pressed his ear to the wall, he could hear the echoes of their voices warbling back at him, loud and low and furious. Maybe it was because Ardyn had spent too much time away, but Noct didn't think so. It felt bigger than that, somehow, and when the door swung open to reveal his father hunched in his coat like a disgruntled crow, Noct snapped to attention.

"Noctis," Ardyn said, with a brittle smile. "How would you like to learn the sword?"

"I will not," Noct heard in the background, "permit--" Ardyn slammed the door shut, and Noct gasped.

"Dad," he whispered. "That was the _emperor._ "

"Family is more important than kings and emperors," Ardyn said, and Noct covered his own mouth. "Don't you agree?"

Noct wasn't sure, but he nodded anyways. Ardyn's smile softened, and he swiped a hand over Noct's hair. "Good boy."

Noct followed him in a daze to a large steel room lined with blinking machines, with enormous fans slowly spinning high above. It made Noct feel like he was inside a giant air conditioner or airship engine, staring up at the propellers from the guts of the machine, and he nearly walked into his father's legs twice trying to keep track of the blades. When he finally looked down, Ardyn was pulling a wooden sword out of the red light he called his armiger, letting it plop into his palm. He tossed it at Noct, who reached out both hands and missed by a mile.

"Once more," Ardyn said. He was testy from his time with the emperor, Noct could tell, so Noct tried not to wince as the sword came at him a second time. He finally caught it on the fourth, but Ardyn was a stormcloud by then, scowling down at Noct like an unruly cat who just had kittens in his chest of scarves.

"First," he said, "we'll teach you how to stand."

Apparently, as Noct learned over the three weeks they spent at the keep, he knew _nothing_ about standing. He knew nothing about anything, really. He didn't walk right. He didn't stand right. His shoulders were too rounded, his legs too straight, his feet pointed in, his chest sticking out, his hands all wrong on the hilt... Every morning, Ardyn picked Noct apart and pushed him together again, until Noct was trembling with effort and slightly tearful at the thought of failing to _stand up_ properly. If he obeyed his father to the letter, sometimes he got a glimpse of the wry, crooked smile Ardyn gave him outside of training, and Noct started to practice his stances everywhere, even when he was waiting by a door while Ardyn went to meetings Noct wasn't allowed to watch. Eventually, his arms stopped shaking when he held his sword, and it felt less awkward to drop into a fighting stance. The first time he did it properly without Ardyn to tap his knees into position or adjust his back, Noct was so pleased he could burst.

The emperor didn't ask to see Noct again. He was banned from the throne room, which was just as well, and climbed onto Ardyn's airship with the uneasy feeling that he might as well not have left home, for all of Gralea he'd been able to see. The city itself was still a mystery to him, disappearing in a flurry of snow as Ardyn's ship ascended, and Noct settled down on the couch to practice summoning and dispelling his practice sword, watching a shower of bright blue light burst over his hands.

"Dad?" he asked, after a while. "Why is _your_ magic red?"

"Part of my condition, dear one," Ardyn said, and Noct winced. If his sickness was so deep that it affected his _magic,_ how long did they really have? How long could they wait around while the empire hammered on Insomnia's magical wall?

"Is the king..." Noct stopped. It was a horrible thought. A small, wretched thought, twisting in Noct's chest like a live creature, eyeless and evil. "Is he... old? Like the emperor?"

"Not particularly," Ardyn said, "but I expect you'd think so."

"And he's the one who can turn the wall on?"

Ardyn chuckled. "It isn't a switch, Noctis. It's in a ring the king wears, which channels his magic into the wall."

"A switch is better," Noct said. His hands slid over the wooden sword hilt. "But what if we got rid of the ring?"

Ardyn smiled and turned to the controls, his broad back straightening slightly. "That's an interesting plan. And how would we do that?"

Noct banished the sword into his armiger, then brought it back again. "I dunno. Steal it?"

"Off his finger? How would we get through the Wall in the first place? Who would we send?" Ardyn twisted to face Noct, his gaze sharp as it was during training, stern and calculating. "Tell me that, Noctis, and we'll see."

And that's how it started, really. Noct spent the whole ride trying to come up with ways to get through the wall: Dig a hole? Not with a sewer full of daemons blocking the way. Fly over it? The whole thing was like a dome, so that didn't work. Try to crack it? Every suggestion was turned aside, every theory debunked, until Noct was so absorbed in the problem that he barely realized they'd landed. He followed his father in a half-aware sort of stumble, and ran full-force into an MT, which spun, opened their red eyes, and hissed with a mouth full of fire. Noct skittered to the side, and one of the mechanics laughed.

"Our Shadow lost his grace in Gralea, eh?" one of them said, and Noct flushed. Usually, he didn't mind his nickname. It made him feel special, like he was important to Ardyn somehow, a part of him. But the sound of the name in the mechanic's mouth had a mocking edge, and Noct slunk off, ears burning, at his father's heels.

That night, Ardyn handed Noct two gifts: A map of Insomnia, complete with the old and new walls, and a heavy book in a language Noct couldn't recognize, full of scribbled notes in the margins. Noct dutifully pinned up the map, but after an hour of puzzling over the book, he brought his second gift back in a miserable cloud of defeat.

"They never taught you Old Solheim?" Ardyn asked, running a hand over the cover.

"Who's they?" Ardyn's expression flickered for just a moment, and he set the book aside. He pulled out his computer and drew up a page full of yellow squares of text, which he squinted at for a minute, then sat back, glancing at Noct sidelong.

"I suppose we'll start simple," he said, and leaned down to pull a sheet of paper out of the printer.

That night, Noct lay on his stomach on his father's bedroom floor, running his finger over the blocky lines of the Solheim alphabet while his father, still going over his own reports, read them back. 

The first package arrived a few days later, plain and wrapped in brown paper, and Noct tore it open to find a glossy workbook for Old Solheim, a pack of math flash cards, and a paperback book called Tactics And Strategy: A Beginner's Guide. Noct stared up at his father in dismay.

"Did I do something wrong?" he asked. Ardyn laughed.

"No." Noct scowled as Ardyn handed him a pencil. "This isn't a punishment, dear Noct, they're tools. They may just help you with your Insomnian problem."

That's what it became, in the end. The Insomnian Problem bled into every spare moment: Noct put up tacks over important buildings on the map of the city and came up with increasingly outlandish ways to get through the wall, which Ardyn shut down every time. Instead of just standing behind Ardyn during meetings, he sat on the floor and went through his books and flash cards. He slowly started translating the first book, which was called _The Long Game,_ and had an unruly scrawl on the first page that said "Property of Ardyn Izunia, Age Fifteen." Noct stared at those words for a good while, wondering what his father had been like as a teenager, who his own parents were, why he dotted his A's with little stars. He started translating all of Ardyn's notes first, poring over a dictionary Ardyn had to order a few days in, and came up with a strange, disjointed view of a teenager with way too much time on his hands.

"Useless," one of the notes said. "Tried this on Somnus. No good."

"Myth?" said another. Then, "Morally questionable," and "Trash! Complete trash!" There was a drawing of a woman on one page, with heavy lines and an arched nose, and Noct cautiously showed it to Ardyn one day while they ate lunch at the mess hall.

"My mother," Ardyn said, without so much as a sliver of emotion. "She gave me that book, I believe."

"Oh," Noct said. His _grandmother._ He stared at her picture, trying to imagine what she must have looked like in real life, with that wide lace on her collar and the sly smile Ardyn had drawn all those years ago. "What was she like?"

"Gods, I can hardly remember," Ardyn said. "One's memory does tend to muddle the details after a while. You'd know that yourself, Noct."

Noct bit his lower lip and traced the ridge of his grandmother's nose. "She's pretty."

Ardyn smiled, but this was different, now, smaller, less sure, kind of like the way Noct felt when he had to say goodbye to the kittens by the gate. Then Ardyn leaned over and gently turned the page, hiding the drawing from view. 

"Keep reading," he said, and Noct pushed a palm to his watering eyes and tried to obey.

Winter hit full-force, making it almost impossible for Noct to run by the gate, so Ardyn took to making him run sprints around the indoor practice courts. Noct learned how to block and parry, how not to fall on his back when taking a blow on his sword, and while a harsh wind battered at the walls and MTs moved sluggish under the bellies of half-finished mechs, Noct drilled and drilled and drilled. And while he moved in the same rote positions and held up his sword in all the blocks and counters Ardyn taught him, Noct's head swam with words, with numbers, with squiggly handwriting and half-finished sketches of people he'd never seen before. He was on the verge of something, he could tell, something hidden in the cramped-up text of _The Long Game,_ in the notes in the margins and the rainbow of tacks spreading out from the Citadel on Noct's map. The Insomnian Problem, the ring, Ardyn's sickness, and all those books and cards and sword drills were connected, but it was like translating Old Solheim: Noct understood bits and pieces, but the meaning wasn't there yet. If he could just fit it all together, maybe he could see the whole, and if he could see the whole, maybe he could come up with a _real_ plan. One that would save his father before it was too late, before even Ardyn was just a drawing in a book somewhere, lost in the fog of memory.


	5. Chapter 5

The hard-packed snow piled up at the border of the keep was almost frozen solid when Noct heard the news: Sylva Nox Fleuret, the queen of Tenebrae and Oracle of the gods, had been killed in a skirmish on the border. The reporter on the radio said it all in a level, matter-of-fact tone. _Sylva Nox Fleuret. Queen of the imperial colony of Tenebrae. Dead at fifty-two. Survived by son Ravus Nox Fleuret and daughter Lunafreya Nox Fleuret._ The maintenance workers crowded around the radio murmured to each other for a minute, then changed the station as soon as an officer strolled into view, the tinny sound of a guitar straining through the air.

Noct drew up his legs as the song changed, and tried to breathe around a lump in his throat. He could only just remember his father talking about the queen, once, when Noct was so small that he had to be lifted up to see the large portrait hanging up over the... He frowned. Maybe it was a museum. His rooms with Ardyn didn't have anything like a mantlepiece, let alone one with carved sylleblossoms in the marble. Noct remembered trying to touch the lumpy paint that made up the queen's face, and the streaks that were a small girl and a boy at her side.

His father was in the office all morning, so no one bothered Noct as he sat next to the radio, rubbing tears out of his eyes with the palm of his hand.

The blizzard struck around noon. Clouds bunched up together in dark, angry clusters that roiled and spread like boiling water over the sky, and the wind rocked unfinished mechs while engineers struggled to pin tarps over their exposed wiring. Noct stood, upending the radio beside him, and a gust of wind roared in his face, a hundred whistling breezes twisting into something almost like a moan.

"It sounds like a person," he said, while MTs marched in straight lines into the warehouses where they were stored. He staggered forward, squinting into the snow and wind, and thought he saw the clouds shift, stirring out of shape. The moan rang out again, and Noct slipped on a patch of ice, landing hard on all fours.

A flash of blue flickered under the flapping tarp holding a mech in place, and went bounding off into one of the warehouses. A cat? Noct stumbled after it, and the clouds opened up, filling the air with snow that whirled and spun, making thick spirals that swallowed up the keep, and Noct with it, in a wall of whiteness. Noct pushed himself into the warehouse, the wind shoving at his back, and fell behind a row of crates with a sigh. He was soaked through, snow sticking to his black coat and pants, and his shoes squelched. He kicked them off, peeling away his frozen socks, and rubbed at his bare feet.

Something squeaked. A glint of light caught Noct's eye, and he sat up, peering at a small bright spot a few feet away, just out of reach. He crawled towards it and held out his hand.

It was a ring. A black ring, with a small crystal at its heart, beautiful and intricately made, and fixed onto the shriveled fingers of a corpse. Noct screamed; His voice rose with the wind, echoing in the dark warehouse, as the skeletal hand twitched, bones grinding together, loose skin drooping and sliding around a fine black uniform. The corpse lifted its head, and Noct looked past black bangs and into hollow pits where the eyes should have been. The corpse twitched again, shoulders hunching, and light bulged at its back, bursting from its uniform and taking the shape of a sword. Then another broke free, and another, a whole army's worth of weapons worming their way out of the body. Noct fell back as the corpse dragged itself towards him, mouth open, throat rattling with words Noct couldn't understand.

"Oh, for pity's sake," said a voice behind him, low and smooth and blessedly familiar. "No need to be so _dramatic._ "

Noct didn't dare turn around, but the corpse looked up, heaved it's back in an arch, and slunk into the shadows like a spider scurrying from the light. Noct was breathing hard, unable to stop, heart heavy in his throat as he tried without success to make his limbs move. His father crouched down next to him, his coat casting a deeper shadow over Noct, and lifted off his hat. He set it over Noct's brow, cutting off most of his vision, and Noct sucked in a great gasp of air.

"Looks like they've found us, my boy," he said.

"Who..." Noct's voice came out as a croak. "Who found--"

"The gods don't care for the death of their servant," Ardyn said. He snaked a hand under Noct's legs, another at his back, and lifted him into his arms. Noct clung to his shirtfront, closing his eyes against the dark. "They think to lay a claim on what is mine, now. Too late, of course." His smile was wicked in the blaring light of the snow outside. "Still, we can't stay here, not anymore."

He carried Noct out of the warehouse, into the wailing, shrieking chaos, and Noct tugged his coat around him, hiding his face from a sky that rolled and howled and wept into the wind.

They couldn't fly to Gralea, not with the storm raging at the borders of Niflheim, so Noct packed up his books, map, his collection of flowers and rocks, and his clothes into a backpack and put on goggles and a mask that pinched his face. He held his father's hand as they trudged out the gate and made a long, unsteady trek to the road, where a massive grey tank with a snow-scraper was waiting for them. They climbed inside, and Noct held his backpack to his chest as the wind tried to knock the tank off course, trying not to think about the corpse in the warehouse, or the way the storm had sounded almost human, like a woman sobbing into the clouds.

The blizzard lasted a week. At the end of it, Noct and Ardyn had left the tank behind to board a train, which had to stop halfway so workers could chip ice off the tracks. Noct got his own bunk, which he lay in while his father taught him the names of the gods.

"The god we face now," he said, while Noct tipped Ardyn's hat over his own eyes, "is sometimes called Shiva. I've heard her go by other names, of course, but she can be the most inconsistent of the gods. Where the others see us as nothing but tools in their own internal squabbles, she sometimes sees us as..." He tapped his knees, looking out at the frost forming on the window. "Pets, perhaps."

"And they're on the king of Lucis' side?" Noct covered his face with both hands. "How do we get through the wall with the _gods_ against us?"

Ardyn smiled. "I do believe we have a plan in the works, dear one. Leave the gods to us. You focus on the Insomnian Problem."

Noct groaned and rolled onto his side. Beyond the window, the sounds of the train workers hacking at ice came back to him like the clack of bones in the dark.

Gralea closed around them like a fist, blocking out the worst of the storm. Noct got to see the inside of a convenience store for the first time in his life to buy new toiletries (including bubble bath that was supposed to turn the water purple), and Ardyn bought him his own scarf, red with gold accents, a perfect replica of the one Noct always admired in Ardyn's closet. Noct wore it even in the warm training halls of the imperial keep, and only took it off at night, where he kept it draped around his bedpost in a place of honor.

Ardyn had one more gift planned for Noct, one that came in the shape of an MT shuddering in the middle of a training room, a naked blade in its hand.

"Attend," Ardyn said, spreading out an arm. "Your first duel."

Noct climbed over the railing, and Ardyn summoned a sword from his armiger, black and jagged at the edges with a glass rose on the hilt. Noct swung it through the air once or twice, and beamed back at Ardyn.

"It's mine?" he asked.

"If you can earn it," Ardyn said. He gestured to the MT. "There's your chance."

Noct looked up at the humanoid soldier. "Uh, so I just... hit it?"

Ardyn snapped his fingers. "Not quite."

The MT lurched to life, eyes flaring red behind its mask. Noct ducked a swipe that made the air whistle, and tasted copper on his tongue--This wasn't a training session, not like the ones between him and his father. This was _real._ He slashed at the MT's legs and looked up, expectant, just as the edge of a blade sliced along his side.

Noct fell back, gasping, a hand clutching his waist. His fingers came back red, and Noct shrank from the MT, which was slowly approaching on shaky legs.

"Go on," Ardyn said from behind him, in a sharp voice. "Get up. You're an Izunia. Izunias don't back down."

Noct thought of his father facing the creature in the warehouse, of his sure footsteps on that awful march through the wind, and slowly got to his feet.

"Right," he whispered, and raised his sword. "We don't."


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Warning for non-fatal suffocation in this part)

The council rooms in the imperial keep were always cold. Ardyn said that the emperor ordered cool air to be piped in on purpose to keep him clear-headed during meetings, but for Noct, buttoned up in a black coat that was already riding up at his wrists, he couldn't help but yearn for the spring that was already dawning in the old garrison. There weren't any grassy fields in Gralea, and Noct only saw the sun on days when his father let him climb onto the roof, where he bribed the workers who cleaned the airship landing pads for food off the trucks that parked in the street below. Noct spent twenty minutes scrubbing airships and sweeping the roof, and another ten hiding away in the shade a little ways off, eating hot fried food in paper wrappers. The sound of the city was faint there, but soothing, and Noct had to force himself not to fall asleep to the distant roar of traffic. There was nothing of the sun inside the keep, though. Noct felt like a weed most days, straggly and thin and stretching for the light.

Noct scratched at his arm. He had another scrape from training; Shallow, this time, probably not enough to leave a scar, caused when Noct was too busy trying to pull off a complicated move to pay attention to his weak spot. He was learning, though, faster than ever, and the look on his father's face when he took out the training MT had been worth it. Still, the healing salve itched, and he desperately wanted to dig under his sleeves.

Instead, Noct suppressed the urge and opened _The Long Game._ He was starting to understand it now, except the boring, twisty parts about politics and diplomacy. It read a lot like a puzzle, all about old kings and queens and how they managed to get what they wanted. 

He leaned against the wall and slowly read through the latest chapter.

"We expect to move to the next phase of testing in three years," the man across from Ardyn said. Noct searched his mind for a name; Besithia. Mr. Besithia was in charge of the research division of the military, and had a habit of laughing at everything the emperor said in a creaky sort of chuckle, even when it wasn't supposed to be funny. He had a cold, hungry look to him, and when Noct found that milky blue gaze flicking his way, he straightened and looked to his father.

"Three? That's impressive." Ardyn crossed his legs. He always gave the smallest movement a million meanings, and Besithia turned his probing look to Ardyn, narrowing his eyes. "Given your inexperience with the Scourge, I expected five at least."

Besithia shifted in his seat. "Give us funding for the new testing site, and we'll have it done in two."

Ardyn tilted his head. "You don't say." He stood, and Noct ran to fetch his hat, which Ardyn took from him with a nonchalance that Noct could tell was deliberate. 

The halls of the keep were made of suspended metal walkways, and every footfall boomed and creaked for what felt like miles. Ardyn's didn't, though; He walked silent as a cat, taking each step with care, and Noct tried to copy the way he placed his feet as they emerged into a wide hall full of MT containment pods.

"Noct?" The security lights of the containment pods outlined the shape of his father, a halo of green and red playing over his coat. "Do you ever get bored, waiting on me like you do?"

Noct's footsteps crashed like thunder as he hurried to keep pace behind Ardyn. "I _want_ to help," he said.

"Yes, but it does get so terribly dull," Ardyn said. He twisted round to look at Noct, but it was hard to see anything but his eyes, shining in the gloom. "So I've come up with a bit of a game."

Two hours later, as he jogged down the second floor hallway towards the accounting offices, Noct thought that his dad had a pretty weird idea of what made something a game.

"Message from Ardyn Izunia," he panted, skidding around the door to the offices and startling a crowd of clerks. They all half-rose from their seats like a flock of irritable birds, chairs scraping on tile, and none of them bothered to meet Noct halfway. He had to go to the first desk he found, pull a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket, and plop it down in front of them. 

"He said if you have anything to send to someone in the keep, pass them on to me." 

Noct watched the clerks as they processed the news. Ardyn had told him to pay attention, to figure out who seemed dismayed or excited. Finally, one woman with a mass of white hair pulled out an envelope and got to her feet. The others glanced at her sharply. She held out the letter to Noct, who slipped it in his jacket.

"That goes to the Minister of Defense. Tell the chancellor thank you," she added. The air around them was deathly still. "And that we appreciate his confidence."

"Sure." Noct edged out the door, uneasy about turning his back on that room of tense, unblinking eyes. "I'll tell him." He took off, racing down the hall towards the elevator, and the door slammed shut behind him.

The Minister of Defense was a heavyset man with stringy blond hair, and he took one look at the envelope in Noct's hand before ripping it to pieces. 

"Inform the chancellor that I don't play his games," he said.

"That belonged to the accountants," Noct started to say, but the man puffed up his chest to shout, and Noct only just managed to scurry away in time.

At the end of the day, his memory was so jumbled that he could barely keep the messages straight, and Noct had to work out the day in an old notebook before he could tell Ardyn what he'd seen. Most of the people he met didn't have messages to send back, unless they were curses or polite, chilly words of thanks. 

"I think you've made a lot of people angry, Dad," Noct said at last, looking up from his notes. Ardyn laughed.

"I hope so," he said. "We'll try again in a few days. Let them try to figure it out on their own, poor things."

The next time Ardyn sent Noct out with messages, he had him deliver a packet of new year bonuses to the accounting office. This time, no one jumped up when Noct came in, and one of them even tried to smile. 

All that running did teach Noct a few things, though. He learned how to sneak into the Defense office without getting caught. He could fight longer without getting winded, walk faster without making the walkways thunder at his approach, and he learned how to put on a blank, uninterested face while the people he handed messages to tried to ply him for details. It was like being invisible in plain sight, and Noct thrilled at the freedom of it.

One afternoon, just before sunset brought the unending chill of Niflheim down on the keep, Noct was given a form to hand to General Glauca.

"Unopened," said the officer leaning over Noct, with a meaningful scowl. Noct just nodded and walked off, wandering upstairs into the officers' quarters.

He found Glauca standing off in the corner of the mess hall, speaking quietly to a young man with blazing red hair and a scruffy beard. The maintenance worker who gave Noct directions said that Glauca's uniform would give him away, and the man with the massive, twisty plated armor looked like someone out of a fairytale. One of the strange ones, though, the ones Ardyn used to talk about, where people had their hands chopped off or their eyes put out by thorns. Noct forced himself to keep a still, level expression, and let his feet smack down on the metal floor. General Glauca turned.

His face was kind.

It was always kind. It never wasn't, even when Noct was bored and lonely and drowning in the long grey corridors, kicking his feet against the couch cushions while people urged him in hard voices to _stop making such a fuss._ Noct would feel a hand on his shoulder, and turn to a wry smile almost as familiar as his own--

"Uncle Titus?" 

It took Noct a second to realize that the small, quiet voice piping through the room was his own. General Glauca gazed down at him, and Noct lurched forward, grasping for his hands. The last time he'd seen him, Noct was waiting outside a council room for his dad, and Titus had slipped him a peppermint from his own... From an armiger? No, that couldn't be right. From his pocket. _I've always had too much of a sweet tooth,_ he'd said, and he shared a conspiratorial smile with Noct, their own private secret. He used to--he used to hold Noct on his shoulder, sometimes, and Noct would kick his heels while his dad--

While his--

Large hands gripped his shoulders. 

"Uncle Titus?" Noct said again. It felt like he was standing under a wave, waiting for the hammer blow of the water to fall. 

One of Titus' armored hands moved to Noct's mouth. 

By the time Noct realized what he was doing, it was too late to fight back. He screamed and clawed and kicked, thrashing in an iron grip, but it wasn't long before spots began to bloom in his vision, and Noct fell back into a roaring darkness.

He woke with a fierce headache in his own bedroom, coughing wetly into his pillow. Ardyn sat in a chair in the corner, wearing just an undershirt and his favorite rose-print trousers, reading _The Long Game._ When Noct sat up, rubbing his throat, Ardyn closed the book.

"And how are we?" Ardyn asked.

Noct grimaced and tried to swallow, but his throat was scraped raw. 

"Better than before, at least," Ardyn said. "We had to do some quick thinking, you know. You maintained a fever for, oh, almost three days before it broke. Can you remember?"

Noct tried, but all he could think of was a hand over his mouth, and fear, and the fluorescent lights of the infirmary. Everything else was a fog. "You took me to a doctor?"

Ardyn's face brightened. "Yes. Good. They did say you might be a little fuzzy on the details. Well, you aren't to leave these rooms until you're better. Doctor's orders." He leaned forward and winked. Noct lay back on his pillow, too exhausted to argue.

After a few minutes of lying there, coughing miserably, Noct was convinced to drink grape-flavored syrup, which coated his tongue and slowly eased his headache. Ardyn sat next to him, reading aloud in Old Solheim until Noct drifted off into uncertain, wildly shifting dreams. When he woke again, he was alone, and the book was on his bedside table with the bottle of medicine. Noct sighed and rolled onto his back.

He must have gotten sick when he was running messages, but he couldn't see how. Maybe one of the clerks had the flu. Maybe it was something going around. Noct turned on the bedside lamp and pulled the book towards him, curling up in his blankets to read.

Spring was well on the way when Noct was ready to go outside again. He went straight to the roof that first day, and sat on the edge with his legs dangling over the side, watching smog rise from the factories in the distance. The maintenance workers on the roof had given him a whole falafel wrap for free, and Noct was carefully picking out every scrap of lettuce he could find and tucking it away in the foil. The falafel was okay if he didn't think of chickpeas as _beans,_ and everything was better fried anyways. Noct decided that while Ardyn seemed to spend all his time talking to council members and officers, it was the people who took out the trash and cleaned the halls who really knew how the keep worked. He wondered if that could be a solution to the Insomnian Problem. Befriend the workers first, who could help him get into the city, then the doctors, who could head out and meet Ardyn beyond the wall. 

A flock of birds took off in a plaza far below, and Noct tracked them as they flew, tracing patterns in the overcast sky.

Life in Gralea wasn't so bad, really. He had the roof, and his dad, and he was getting so good at fighting that he hardly ever got hurt anymore. Not much, anyways. 

There were a lot of people who had it worse.

Noct wrapped up the remains of his falafel and got up to meet his dad outside the throne room.

When he got there, only panting a little with the effort of running down several flights of stairs, Noct found his father waiting for him at the door. Ardyn beamed and gestured for Noct to come to him, and Noct pressed himself to Ardyn's side, letting his cape slide over his shoulders.

"Wait a moment," Ardyn said, as if Noct had anywhere to go. "I want you to meet someone."

The door didn't open for another five minutes, and by that point, Noct was about ready to _die_ with excitement. He stood on his toes as a teenaged boy in a white soldier's uniform marched out, craning around him to see who Ardyn was waiting for. The boy stopped, his easy step faltering, and looked up at Ardyn with a frank, almost fearful expression.

"My son," Ardyn said to Noct, bowing to the boy in uniform with a great sweep of his coat, "may I introduce to you his highness Ravus Nox Fleuret of Tenebrae."

"Son?" The boy's voice sounded strangled, like he was choking on something. Noct bowed quickly, and the boy--Prince Ravus--jerked back as though struck.

"I don't believe you've had the chance to meet until now," Ardyn said, in the smooth, musical voice he always used when he was trying to make people angry. Ravus opened his mouth. "It's a shame your dear sister couldn't visit. Is she well?"

Ravus had to wrench his gaze away from Noct. "Yes," he said. His hands were fists at his side. "Quite well, thank you."

"His highness has chosen to enlist in the emperor's army," Ardyn said to Noct, laying a hand on Noct's back. Ravus' eyes flicked to focus on Noct's shoulder, as though he could see right through it. "As a show of good faith."

"Really?" Noct perked up a little. "I never heard of a prince _fighting._ Do you use a sword? A spear? I'm still on swords right now."

"I..." Ravus smoothed his hands over the side of his pants. "I'm afraid I must go."

"Do give your sister my regards," Ardyn said. "When you see her next."

Ravus gave a short nod. _He's afraid,_ Noct thought, suddenly, and looked to his father to find Ardyn smiling. Just smiling, like he always did, not threatening at all. 

"He's kind of weird, for a prince," Noct whispered, as Ravus' form started to shrink against the wide hall beyond.

"Oh, well," Ardyn said, in a voice that echoed around them in a small chorus. "He _did_ just lose his mother. But he's a sensible young man. I'm sure that if he keeps his head down and works hard, his luck will turn soon enough."

Ravus stopped again, shoulders pulled taut, for just a breath before striding off into the dark.

The next day was an errand day, and Noct spent most of the morning running between offices in the research department, which was buzzing with excitement over some new breakthrough. One of the doctors even looked at Noct before handing him a message for the emperor's private offices, grinning nervously.

"Give me his answer quickly and I'll have a few gil in it for you," he said, and Noct couldn't help but smile. He had a collection of coins in his room, but he'd never actually earned any before. He shoved the message in his pocket and took the elevator to the fifteenth floor, whistling under his breath.

When the doors opened, he tripped out into a wide warehouse where all the mechs were kept. There were a few soldiers practicing their parade march in the corner, but Noct didn't pay them any mind, cutting straight across the warehouse towards a suspended bridge.

Then someone _hissed_ at him. 

Noct slowed down, searching the shadows for movement, and spotted Prince Ravus leaning against a railing, holding a lit cigarette. He flapped a hand at Noct, and Noct warily slipped into the shadows of a giant mech, sidling up beside the prince.

"I don't think that's good for you," Noct said, nodding to the cigarette. Ravus huffed. He had blond hair so light it was almost white, and his jaw was square and hard, even if his cheeks still had some baby fat. 

"You sound like Lunafreya," he said. His eyes were strange, up close, one blue, one almost violet. "I figure it doesn't matter, in the long run." He took a long drag and blew out a cloud of smoke. "I wanted to speak with you in private."

"I don't have much time," Noct said. "I'm running an errand for--"

"What does he call you?" Ravus asked. "Ardyn." It was a strange thing to say. Noct sucked at his cheek for a second before answering.

"Noct."

Ravus' face tightened. "I see." He rocked back on his heels and looked up at the ceiling. 

"Are you okay?" Noct asked. Ravus jerked, almost dropping his cigarette, and looked down at Noct with the same wide-eyed, bewildered look he wore when they first met. Noct shoved his hands in his pockets and looked away. "I mean... your mom. I heard on the radio. Are you okay?"

Ravus was silent for a long moment. Noct searched his face, so expressive and open compared to the closed-off masks of the emperor's council, and thought that maybe he should talk to Ardyn. Ardyn would know what to do.

"It's fine if you aren't," Noct said. "I won't tell."

Ravus let out a long, shaky breath and dropped the cigarette, crushing it under his boot. "Thank you. No. No, I don't believe I'll be... okay... for some time, but I'll manage. And you?"

"Oh, I'm good," Noct said. "Dad taught me a new move with the sword yesterday. Do you want to see?"

"Maybe another time," Ravus said.

Noct bounced on his toes. He'd have to run to make it to the emperor's office, but he didn't know how to slip away without being rude. His dad would bow, but Noct had a feeling Ravus wouldn't like that. He was just about to back away when Ravus spoke again, in that barking, abrupt tone he used when he talked to Ardyn.

"I would like us to be friends," he said.

Noct blinked. "Oh." 

Ravus continued, a desperate edge in his voice. "I'm due for basic training tomorrow, but I'll be sent back to the capital regularly, from what I'm told. Perhaps we can. Perhaps I can speak to you then."

"Sure," Noct said. "Dad and I are in an apartment on the fifth fl--"

"Don't," Ravus started, and closed his eyes. "Don't call him... I wouldn't want to put him out. Perhaps we'll meet elsewhere."

"The roof's nice," Noct said, trying to think of what a teenager might be interested in. He'd never actually talked to a teenager before, but he suspected Ravus was an odd one; He wore his uniform like an adult, trying to act older than he was. "Or the training hall?"

"Yes," Ravus said, drawing out the word. "The training hall is acceptable."

"Great!" Noct backed up a step. "Well. I gotta go. It was nice... nice making friends with you, your highness." He grinned, realization dawning like sunlight pooling in an empty room. "You're my first!"

Ravus' smile was weak and small. "An honor," he said. It didn't sound like one, but he was still smiling, so that counted for something. Noct ran off, pounding down the sloping metal walkways towards the anthill that was the emperor's office, and his heart felt so light he practically flew.


	7. Chapter 7

Noctis Izunia loved his father. Of _course_ he loved his father. But there were some days, like the muggy, overcast morning shortly after Noct's ninth birthday, when he seriously had to wonder why.

"Gralea," Ardyn said, standing on the edge of the keep's first landing pad with his hands on his hips. "The jewel of Niflheim. Breathe in that fresh smog, Noctis. Behold the skyline--See how that paper mill looks like a row of teeth? And ah, the dulcet tones of traffic collisions and car horns..."

"Dad," Noct said. He was hunched in a thin black shirt and gym shorts like a skinny-legged crow. "Please."

"One day, Noct, everything the sun touches shall be yours."

"The sun isn't even _out_ yet," Noct said. His father laughed. "Can we go back? It's too gross to warp."

"Nonsense," Ardyn said. He handed Noct a bean bag moogle toy and pointed to the second landing pad fifty feet away. "I want you to warp there. You have thirty seconds."

" _Dad._ "

Ardyn cocked an eyebrow, tapping his wrist, and Noct groaned. He threw the moogle off the edge and warped after it.

The worst part about warping in midair was the half second _between_ warps. If Noct waited too long to wind up for a second throw, he'd drop too far to make it to the landing pad. If he didn't throw the moogle hard enough, he'd use up all his energy on multiple warps. And on top of it all was his body, lurching in the after effects of a warp, his stomach sloshing and groaning, bile rising in his throat.

Noct made it three throws before his clammy fingers slipped on the moogle, missed, and sent the toy plummeting to the ground.

The wind rose to a sharp whistle as Noct began to fall, a small black speck against the spires of the keep, face ashen with terror. He wrenched off his shoe and threw it as far as he could, but when he warped to meet it, his body was still falling. He threw again, and again, light bursting around his eyes like rain as he rose bit by bit, in a staggered ascent to the top of the second landing pad. Finally, his fingers gripped the edge, and he hung there, panting, as his shoe clattered down to join the moogle on the roof far below.

Above him, someone started to clap. He strained to look up at Ardyn standing over him, beaming, slowly applauding with all the gravitas of a man witnessing a small miracle. 

"Oh, well done, Noct," he said. "Twenty-three seconds."

"Um," Noct said. His fingers burned as he swung from the edge. "Um, Dad."

"We'll move on to a falling warp as soon as you're ready," Ardyn said, turning around. Noct bit his lip until he tasted blood, pulling himself inch by inch onto the landing pad. He rolled onto his back, sweat trickling down his neck, and stared into the low-hanging clouds.

"Sometimes I kind of hate you," Noct mumbled.

"You aren't nearly old enough for adolescent angst," Ardyn said. "Save your hatred for puberty, Noct."

Noct groaned and covered his face as Ardyn, tossing a new moogle toy high in the air, stopped to laugh at his own joke.

Ravus didn't come back to Gralea for almost half a year. When he did, Noct had moved on to fighting two MTs at once every other day, with mixed results. Sometimes his father allowed him to warp, but lately he'd banned Noct entirely.

"If you're to defend yourself outside the keep," Ardyn told him one morning, "you need to be prepared to use your magic sparingly. The king of Lucis doesn't like to hear of anyone not of his line, or of his Glaive, I suppose, bearing any sort of magic."

So Noct had to resort to the limitations of his own body, which meant that when he was caught between two MTs with nowhere to go, he had to take a blow just to escape. When Ravus showed up at the door to the training hall late that autumn, he came in to find Noct sitting in the corner, winding a bandage around an arm dripping with blood.

"Noctis!" 

Noct looked up. "Ravus!" he cried. "It's been forever! How--"

Ravus vaulted the railing to the sparring space and dropped to a knee at Noct's side, looking strangely pale. His face was thinner, too, older, and there were hard lines around the corners of his mouth. He took Noct's injured arm almost gently, and Noct felt callouses under his fingers that hadn't been there before.

"Who did this to you?" Ravus' voice was tight as he took the bandages from Noct, lifting them just a fraction to see the shape of the wound beneath. "Was it Ardyn?"

"What? No." Noct shrugged. "It was me. I messed up during training. Don't worry, it doesn't happen much anymore."

Ravus' eyes narrowed dangerously, and he looked Noct over, taking in fresh scars that hadn't been there when they first met. "This can't continue," he said. He tied off Noct's bandage with an expert hand.

"I know," Noct said. Heat rose up the back of his neck. "Sorry. I'm getting better."

Ravus paused, and the hard look in his eyes faded. "Of course," he said. "I apologize. I was only worried."

Noct looked away. It was the first time anyone had ever made a fuss over an injury. The doctors at the infirmary didn't even use his name, and Ardyn treated even broken fingers like temporary setbacks, nothing to cry over. It almost felt... nice, to have someone worry about him. He wondered if that was what having a big brother was like.

"How long are you staying?" Noct asked. 

"Only a few days." Ravus unconsciously smoothed back Noct's hair. "They bypassed basic training. I was sent right to the front."

"You're kidding," Noct said. "Where? Did you fight the Kingsglaive? What was it like?"

Ravus sat down next to Noct, drawing up his long legs. His gaze drifted, gone hazy in the dim light, and his hands clenched on his uniform.

"The sunsets are nice," he said. 

They sat there for a while, even after Noct was supposed to report to his father in the second council room, talking in low voices. Ravus told Noct about the constellations he could see from his pallet in the main army, the different animals he passed, and Lunafreya, who was stuck in Tenebrae, studying for her trial to become Oracle.

"She's becoming a bit of a radical, our Luna," Ravus said, and for a second, Noct felt like he was intruding on something private, something precious and fragile. Then Ravus took out a coin to teach Noct how to walk it over his knuckles, and the moment passed.

He never did say anything about the war, though. 

The next time Ravus was summoned to Gralea, Noct was up to three MTs, and Ravus had been promoted to a corporal. He brought Noct a pressed sylleblossom flower from Tenebrae and a book called _Cats of Eos,_ which Noct read through every night for weeks. He drew pictures of coeurls on bits of paper and taped them up on the wall beside the flowers from Ravus and the garrison, and cut apart his old jacket to sew up a leather case for Ravus to keep Luna's letters in. When he gave it to Ravus, nervously twisting his fingers as the case was examined, he was rewarded with an actual smile, none of the tight-lipped grimacing Ravus did those days. 

"It's good to see you with a friend closer to your own age," Ardyn said, when Noct ran after him, still elated with the success of his gift. "Why, I remember your first imaginary friend... Titus, you called him. Uncle Titus. Gods, even your imaginary friends were middle-aged. It was a little distressing, I must admit."

Noct frowned. Titus did sound familiar, but he wasn't sure where he'd heard it before. His throat went tight, and he breathed deep, an unexplainable fear racing through him. "I don't remember Titus."

"I do," Ardyn said. "You made up so many curious stories about him. But you're older now, of course, and I suppose you've quite outgrown him."

"Yeah," Noct said, blinking hard. "Guess so."

That winter, just as the first blizzard swept over the city, Noct finally finished _The Long Game._ He lay in his bed for what felt like days, running his hands over the leather cover, before he got up to tiptoe his way to his father's room. Ardyn was sitting at his desk as usual, hair tied out of his face in a loose ponytail.

"Ah, Noct," he said, smiling. 

"You're playing the Long Game with Lucis," Noct said. Ardyn stilled, his posture straightening, his easy smile shrinking into a thin line. "The Insomnian Problem's real."

Ardyn set down his pen with a click that rang through the room. "What makes you say that?" he asked.

Noct worried his lower lip. "Everything you do comes back to Lucis," Noct said. "You used chapter four when you made the Altissian ambassador angry, and she went to Lucis but got stopped at the border and had to come back. You used chapter two with the Kingsglaive, I think--"

"Sabotage?" Ardyn asked. His voice was toneless, empty of his usual smooth cadence.

"You always know where they're going to be," Noct said. "I think you have a spy. And you used chapter seven on the emperor, when you made him think he came up with the god-killer machine. And you, um."

Ardyn waited, a statue in flower-print and stripes, hands clasped in his lap.

"I think I'm chapter five," Noct whispered.

Ardyn's lips parted slightly. " _Five?_ " he asked. Noct blushed to his roots.

Chapter five of _The Long Game_ was more of a history lesson than anything. It told the stories of the kings of Solheim, who had two partners that helped them get what they wanted, and Noct had reread it at least three times over. First was their Shield, their public face, their defender and diplomat. Everyone knew their Shield, loved them, even--The kings and queens of Lucis kept up the tradition to the present day.

But then there was the Sword. The King's Sword sometimes wasn't even listed in the public records; They were the ones who went out to the dark places and fought what they found there, sometimes wearing the armor of their king to make it look like the king themself did it. They were the ones who killed who the king said to kill, who broke into enemy territory alone, who served as the king's shadow. 

"Which one do you think you are?" Ardyn asked. 

"A Sword," Noct said, and Ardyn finally moved, shifting in his seat. "If you want me to be."

"You don't want to be a Shield?" Ardyn asked.

"You don't need defending," Noct said. He could barely breathe. "Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you don't, don't want me to be--"

"Do _you?_ " Ardyn asked. "Is this what you want?"

Noct made himself nod. "You're dying," he whispered. It was hard, painfully hard to say out loud. "I... saw you, a month ago, crying in the sink..."

They hadn't been tears, though. What Noct had seen dripping onto the white porcelain of the bathroom sink was black and viscous, oozing like blood out of Ardyn's eyes and along the corners of his mouth. It was his illness, Noct knew, and no matter how many times Ardyn tried to brush it off, it was catching up to him.

"I don't want you to go," Noct said. His voice was thick, his eyes burning. "Maybe you can't go into Lucis anymore, but I can. I'll do whatever it takes. Dad, I can't--" he stopped, pressing his lips together. "I don't want to--"

"Here, now," Ardyn said, and Noct was pulled into his arms, face pressed to his ruffled shirt. "I'm not going anywhere soon. But if this is what you want... It will be difficult. You'll have to work harder than ever, and still we may not succeed."

"We will," Noct whispered, clinging to his father. "We have to."

Ardyn pet his hair. "Then I'd be honored to have you as my Sword," Ardyn said, in the language of Old Solheim. "My Noctis. My little shadow."


	8. Chapter 8

Regis Lucis Caelum's private bedroom hadn't been used in three weeks by the time Clarus, watching the shadows deepen under Regis' eyes, banished him from the office.

Regis knew it was foolish. A few scattered hours of restless sleep in his desk chair did nothing for his health. He recalled his own father's descent just before the king used the last of his strength to feed the wall, leaving Regis to scramble for the ring even as his father's heart monitor zeroed out. Sleep had been hard to come by then, as well. 

His rooms were quiet. The entire Citadel was quiet those days, as though ghosts roamed the halls, muffling all sound in their wake.

"Hello, love," Regis said, trailing his hand along the glossy finish of a picture frame. The woman in the picture was young, her dark, bluish-black hair hanging in her eyes, and she had a hand on a necklace that shimmered with opals. "Radiant as ever, I see."

 _Flatterer,_ she would have said, crinkling her eyes in a secret smile. Regis slipped off his jacket and began unbuttoning his shirt. 

"Still no news," he said. "I imagine you're doing a better job of searching for our son than I am." He shrugged into a night-robe embroidered with silver stars, and slowly climbed into his wide, empty bed. "I'd pray to the gods to intercede, of course, but they haven't done much so far, have they?" 

The darkness of his room held no answer, but then, Regis hadn't really expected one. He lay down, the ache in his bones twinging with nothing left to distract him, and thought of Noctis. Noctis, waiting for him after school ended, kicking his heels on the wide couch Regis had installed outside the throne room just for him. Noctis, sneaking lizards in his pockets and begging for a kitten, for a coeurl, for the fat old tom that hung around the kitchen and had three legs and a squint. Noctis, who disappeared in a flicker of firelight, in a sudden, unseasonable wind that cut through the wreckage of their transport van...

Regis pushed himself out of bed again. "Just another hour," he said to the picture of his wife, gathering up his clothes again. "One more."

When Clarus entered the king's office the next morning, he found Regis with his feet propped up on the desk and a dark robe wrapped around his work clothes, dozing amid a growing pile of maps. He sighed and set down a cup of tea, and Regis blinked slowly, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

"Good morning, Reg," Clarus said.

"Is it light already?" Regis removed his feet from the desk with a groan. Clarus declined to comment that it was barely dawn as Regis started shuffling maps. "Well, then, let's get started."

 

\---

 

On the first day of Noct's new training schedule, he woke at dawn.

It wasn't like he _wanted_ to. Ardyn rolled an ice flask into the middle of the room when Noct didn't answer him the first time he called, and Noct jolted awake as the flask burst, sending a flurry of snow puffing into the air. He scrambled out of bed, hopping over floorboards laced with frost, and shoved on his clothes.

"What the heck, Dad?" he shouted.

"Consider it a learning experience," Ardyn said, leaning against the wall as Noct hobbled to the bathroom, one foot stuck in his pants. "Your room is hardly secure. Anyone could sneak in while you sleep--"

"Yeah," Noct said. "Like you. With an _ice spell._ "

"Exactly," Ardyn said. "How quickly you catch on."

Noct muttered to himself as he brushed his teeth, shivering despite the hot water running in the sink and fogging the mirror.

That morning, Ardyn taught Noct simple traps, one meant to show if someone had entered the room while he was away, and one to tug a fishing line on his finger if his door opened while he slept. 

"Do remember that last one," Ardyn said, as Noct followed him to the training hall. "The next flask may contain fire."

Noct stopped in the middle of the sparring ring, searching for the usual MTs that tended to wait by the power line. The room was empty, the doors all locked and flashing with security sensors, and it wasn't until he heard his father draw his sword that Noct realized the fight had begun.

The flat of Ardyn's blade felt like a stone wall on his side, and Noct crumpled with a yelp that echoed off the high ceiling. He rolled, gasping for breath, and Ardyn hooked a foot under him, pushing him over. 

"I'd almost say I'm disappointed," Ardyn said, and Noct looked up into a humorless face, dark smudges rising and falling like bruises around Ardyn's eyes. "Get up."

Noct tried. He got to one knee before Ardyn swung his sword again, and it was all he could do to fend him off, his arms aching with the effort. Then Ardyn made a slight, almost imperceptible move with his wrist, and Noct's own sword was thrown through the air, landing with a clatter several yards away.

"Get up," Ardyn said again.

Noct never even made it past his knees. The fight ended with Noct panting, back to the railing of the sparring ring while Ardyn examined his sword, his broad back cutting off the light. Ardyn turned to him, and Noct tried to suppress a flinch.

"It's natural to be afraid," Ardyn said. He crouched down on his ankles before Noct, gazing into his wide, rapidly-blinking eyes. "I killed my first daemon when I was around your age. Fear certainly kept _me_ alive. Just don't let it stop you, Noct. I'll need you before this is done."

Noct ran a hand over his sweating forehead. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I'll keep going. Can I. Can I go to my room real quick? To change?"

"Of course," Ardyn said. He smiled, but it was the same smile he wore after Noct was attacked, with no warmth in it. "I'll wait right here."

The path to the stairs seemed impossibly long, now that Noct was jogging with both hands pressed to his sore side, his calves screaming in protest. He practically fell into their rooms and clawed his way into his bedroom, which still radiated a slight chill from the ice spell. 

Noct looked at his wall, plastered with pale flowers and childish drawings of cats, and the pain in his side seemed to rise through him, burning along his veins and roaring in his ears. He limped to the wall and tore at the papers with his fingers, bits of drawings falling to the floor, petals tearing under his touch. A flower fell on his shoe, a drawing of a housecat tumbled away under the bed, and when Noct came to at last, it was like stepping out of a dream. He bent to pick up a flower, smoothing out a crushed petal, and searched for the pin that had held it in place. When he stuck it back in, his hands were shaking.

"I'm sorry," he said, dropping to his knees to piece together a drawing of a Galahdian coeurl. His vision blurred, and he screwed up his face, trying to breathe. "I'm sorry."

The coeurl was ripped beyond repair, it's front paw too crumpled to tape together. It was a simple thing, just a pen drawing on a loose scrap of paper, but Noct curled over it like it was a real, living creature.

 _I want my dad,_ he thought, even though his father was in the keep just a few floors away. 

"I want my dad," he said.

The room was suddenly too large and too close all at once, and Noct wept into his hands, kneeling in a spray of dried flowers and shredded paper.

The next day, when he readied his sword, Noct put on the same blank expression he wore when he was delivering messages in the keep. Ardyn's answering smile was cruel, but the core of Noct was small and cold, pushed down into a ball in the base of his chest. 

His father's sword knocked him to the metal floor, rattling his teeth with the impact, but it didn't hurt this time. It didn't hurt at all.

 

\---

 

The fields of Duscae were warm, buzzing with clouds of insects that hovered over patches of mud and thick grass. Noct was eleven years old, still nowhere near as high as Ardyn's chest, but already growing out of his new pants, and his ankles were sore with fresh bites.

"The tomb should be this way," Ardyn said, pointing towards a copse of trees. Noct barely noticed. It had been so long since he'd set foot outside of Gralea that every movement, every croak of a frog and hush of a tree rustling in the breeze caught his attention. He blinked when Ardyn snapped his fingers, and dutifully turned to the trees.

"Keep a watchful eye, Noct," Ardyn said. "We're still in Lucian territory, and they don't take kindly to the sight of Imperial ships landing in their hills."

"They'll deal," Noct said, and Ardyn smirked. "You sure we can even steal this thing? Doesn't the tomb belong to the king?"

"Our magic should confuse the spells laid on the tomb," Ardyn said. "With luck, you may have first pick at a weapon from the king of Lucis' own armiger."

"Oh, he'll be _really_ happy about that," Noct said. He trudged through the grass, breathing in the heavy scent of mud and fresh growth. He could get lost in those trees, disappearing in their shadows. Maybe he'd run across a lumberjack or a farmer--his dim memories of a thick book of fairytales had taught him that those were the best kind of fictional strangers, at least--and he'd work for them for a while. Maybe he'd get to ride in the back of their truck, and they'd have a daughter or a son his age with black hair and brilliant brown eyes...

Brown eyes were Noct's weakness, lately. The other day, a mechanic with brown eyes and well-muscled shoulders had smiled at him, and Noct turned so red he thought he might _die._ He'd have to ask Ravus about it sometime. Ardyn probably never tripped over his own feet just because of a pretty smile, but Ravus? Ravus would know how it felt.

"Noct." Noct was jolted out of his thoughts at the sight of his father standing before him, a hand on his hip. Above them was a rounded building framed by broken pillars, with a small platform surrounded by grass. "Memorize this structure. Most royal tombs follow this model."

"Yes, sir." It was easier to say _sir_ when Ardyn started snapping out orders. _Dad_ was for off hours. Noct stepped forward, and when he reached the thick iron door at the front of the tomb, Ardyn removed a black key from his pocket and passed it over. 

When the door ground open, Ardyn remained on the sunny platform while Noct strode headfirst into the dark.

The tomb was lined with carvings of old kings and queens, and the crest of Lucis was everywhere, even etched in the ceiling. Before him sat a raised statue of a king holding a shield, stone fingers splayed over the front.

The woman standing over the king raised her head and smiled.

Noct hissed in a sharp breath. The air in the tomb was stale and damp with mold, and the dust around the statue wasn't even disturbed. He reached out a hand for the shield.

"Don't be afraid," the woman said. She stood in the back, now, dark hair framing her face. Her eyes were closed, and when Noct tried to focus, squinting at her high collar and quirking smile, he saw nothing but the tomb wall.

"Dad?" Noct called, but his voice rushed out of him, coming out as a gasp of air. He threw himself into the shield, which rose over his head, light gleaming along its surface, almost spectral and unreal.

Then it turned on him, flowing through Noct like the punch of an icy wind. Noct fell back, stumbling into the light outside the tomb, holding his chest with both hands. Ardyn steadied him with a hand on his shoulder, and the ghostly shield materialized again, floating around Noct in a tight circle before vanishing in a flash of magic.

"Well done," Ardyn said, as Noct gasped in his hold. "Very well done. I'd say that went off without a hitch, don't you?"

Noct stared into the dark, where the tomb lay empty, it's door yawning open into blackness. _Don't be afraid._ "Yeah," he said, turning aside. "I guess so."


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a somewhat graphic death scene in the middle of this one, fair warning.

"Perhaps I'll bring Luna to Gralea to meet you," Ravus said one afternoon, sitting on the roof a few weeks before Noct's thirteenth birthday. Ravus was a gangly young man of twenty, with captain's stripes stark on his chest and hair down to his shoulders, but he still liked to sneak cigarettes when he could, hidden away in the pockets of his uniform. He held one out for Noct, who summoned just enough fire to light it. Noct scooted further upwind and watched traffic crawl below his swinging feet.

"Think she'll say yes?" he asked. 

"I live in hope." 

Princess Lunafreya didn't play the Game, not like Noct or Ardyn or Ravus. She let the empire know exactly what she thought, but she always wrapped it up in diplomacy and delivered it with a smile, so it was hard to know what rules, if any, she bothered to follow. Just a few months before, she'd refused to stop healing people so she could meet with an official from Gralea, and Ravus had been reassigned to the border for six weeks, holding the line against the Lucian Kingsglaive. 

He didn't tell her that, of course. It was all part of the Game for Ravus. Instead of spreading the consequences like Ardyn did, Ravus tried to take it all on himself, bearing the worst of the burden. Kind of like a Sword, really.

"She has a penpal now," Ravus said. Noct glanced up. "She won't tell me who, but then, she's rather tight-lipped these days."

"You should tell her what you're doing," Noct said. It had taken him some time to figure it out, but it was pretty obvious that Ravus was using his position to his people's advantage. Most of the troop movements under Ravus' command involved MTs in the forefront, with enlisted human soldiers from Tenebrae as snipers and scouts. He was always looking out for them, pretending not to notice how they called him a traitor for moving up the ranks so quickly. Noct admired him for it, even if Ravus still wasn't that good at hiding his emotions.

"Luna already suspects," Ravus said, taking a drag of his cigarette. "She simply doesn't like my methods."

"You don't think she's writing to someone she shouldn't?" 

"Of course she is," Ravus said. "She shouldn't be writing to _anyone._ " He sighed. "This is depressing. Will your keeper let you walk the city with me for a while?"

Noct rolled his eyes. Ravus always talked about Ardyn like that. "No," he said. "You can't find what we're looking for in the city." Ravus dropped his cigarette, and Noct caught it, tossing it into his armiger. "Come on, Ravus. A bird could eat it and die or something."

"You'd know, mother hen."

"Doofus," Noct said. Ravus smiled and mussed his hair, which he knew Noct _hated,_ and pulled out another cigarette. Noct lit it again.

"Be careful out there," Ravus said. "Whatever it is you're doing. I have reports that the Glaive are splitting off from the main army. There are sightings all over the countryside. Like they're searching for something," he added, looking Noct in the eyes.

"Where'd you hear that?" Noct asked. "I didn't see any reports--"

"I _can_ have my own intel, you know," Ravus said. "Just keep an eye open, Noct. And if you do see a Glaive, try taking them alive. You'd be surprised at what you may learn."

"From a Lucian?"

"They're only people," Ravus said. He tapped ash over the edge of the roof. "Time to report to my own handlers, I suppose. Give Ardyn my regards."

"Your real regards, or the ones that everyone wants you to give?"  
Noct asked.

"The real ones," Ravus said. He stood, adjusting his uniform, and held out a hand for Noct to take. "That man is the only person in Niflheim who _wants_ to be hated."

Noct wasn't so sure about that, but there was no use arguing with Ravus. He walked him back to the stairs, where Ravus took a left towards the elevator, and Noct ran down the long service stairs to the twelfth floor, where his father was harassing Verstael Besithia again.

"Ravus still hates you," Noct whispered, standing on his toes to speak in Ardyn's ear. Ardyn grinned.

"Wonderful. Pretend I'm saying something scandalous about Verstael, then meet me in the mess hall for coffee."

Noct smirked, glancing sidelong at Mr. Besithia, who bristled like an irate voretooth. So maybe Ravus _was_ right about Ardyn, a little. Still, when Ardyn appeared in the mess hall with to-go cups stacked with whipped cream and shaved chocolate, it was easy to let that side of Ardyn go. It wasn't _him,_ not really. It was just what his plans demanded of him. Ravus never saw the Ardyn who whispered bad puns in Old Solheim and let Noct eat all the whipped cream off the lid of his cup. He didn't know the Ardyn who stayed up with him when he was sick, or showed him how to mask himself with magic so they could watch a real coeurl stalk across the grass in Duscae. He definitely didn't know the Ardyn who came before, the vague suggestion of a warm smile drifting in Noct's hazy memories, a warm touch of a hand in his hair. If he did, maybe things would be different.

Maybe. In the end, the truth was that Ravus was still a captive, and Ardyn worked for the empire. Nothing could ever change that.

"I've found another tomb," Ardyn said, folding his napkin while Noct stole a sip of Ardyn's coffee. "It bears a sword hidden behind a waterfall near Lestallum. There may be a few, ah, daemons here and there--"

"So long as they aren't flans, I'm fine," Noct said. He caught Ardyn's gleeful look and groaned. "Dad, I broke out all over my face the last time one of those hit me."

"That's natural," Ardyn said. "You're a bag of hormones and grease at this time of life, Noct--I assure you that a flan won't tip the scales. I, however, will be needed in Gralea--"

"Bet _you_ never had a face full of pimples before--"

Ardyn cleared his throat, and Noct straightened out of his habitual slouch. "As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, I cannot assist you in this particular outing," Ardyn said. "But no fear. I've made all the necessary arrangements already."

 

\---

 

Aranea Highwind, a young lieutenant of the imperial army with a mass of white hair that would have made Ravus speechless with envy, stamped her boots on the ice behind a sheet of roaring water and scowled.

"I can't believe I'm playing fucking babysitter to the mini adventurer's club," she said.

"I don't _need_ a babysitter," Noct snapped back, wringing out the hem of his sodden shirt. "I'm twelve."

"Oh, hell on wheels."

Aranea was the most beautiful woman Noct had ever met, which only made everything ten times worse. It was bad enough being shoved into an airship with a person who told him to _buckle up, buttercup_ and asked if he wanted to _pick up any puzzles or shit from the jiffy store,_ but she had to say it all while wearing a uniform that barely hid her muscular arms, and her eyes had a gleam of wicked humor to them that made everything Noct tried to say come out sounding sullen and dull.

"So where's the dead guy, boss?" Aranea asked, when Noct inched his way into the cavern. Ice slid over his hand, and he turned on the small light pinned to his jacket. "Hey, kid, let me go first. You're gonna fall."

"I don't _fall_ on _ice,_ " Noct lied, stomping forward. "I grew up in Niflheim. I'm used to ice."

"Bullshit," Aranea said cheerfully. She grabbed Noct by the collar and lifted him off the ground, then set him down behind her. " _I_ grew up in Niflheim. You look like you come from Leide, and you _talk_ like his excellency. Which is fucking weird, because you're eight."

"Twelve," Noct said.

"Whatever."

Noct muttered darkly under his breath as Aranea walked carefully into the dark. _Ardyn_ always let him scout ahead. Ardyn didn't doubt his abilities. Ardyn would've sent Noct off on his own, probably, and sat down in the sun outside with a book, because he trusted Noct to get the job _done._

"You don't have to come with, you know," Noct said. Aranea snorted.

"Yeah," she said. "I'll leave the chancellor's kid in a cave full of daemons. _That'll_ go over well." 

At that moment, as though to solidify Noct's status as the grimiest, pimpliest, scrawniest scrublord ever to fumble in the dark, a flan bubbled up from the ground and sprayed slime in Noct's face.

"Shit!" Aranea drew her sword, but Noct was already trudging through the flan itself, digging his way out with the shield from his armiger. Aranea stared at him as he staggered into the open, covered in slime and holding a shield almost as big as he was, and covered her mouth with a hand.

"We can, uh." She coughed, and Noct glared at her before pushing on down a narrow tunnel. "We can go back, if you want."

"No," Noct said, holding the wall for balance as he rounded a corner. "Now it's personal."

The problem with flans, Noct thought, as he oozed and squished his way over patches of slick ice, was that they were named after one of the worst desserts in existence. Flans. Pudding. Jello. Creme brûlée. Dessert had no right to _bounce,_ and neither did daemons. Now, if they were imps? Imps Noct could handle. Even Aranea would have been impressed with how Noct took care of _imps._ But no. No, the rulers of Lucis had to throw their tombs in Flan Central, and Noct was going to come out of the cave looking like Mount Ravatogh was erupting on his _face._

"Watch it," Aranea said, a second too late. Noct grunted as he slipped on a glob of slime on his boot, fell feet-up into the air, and landed with a crack on the ice. Ice that crumbled underneath him, giving way to a yawning pit that opened up with a boom like thunder. Noct summoned a sword and threw it into the gloom, and warped to find it still plummeting into the pit. He threw it again and heard a faint _chunk_ of splintering ice before he warped, and he landed on a small shelf of stone overlooking a wide, impossible gap.

"Fuck!" Aranea's voice was distant and faint.

"I hate _everything!_ " Noct shouted back.

"Wait there!" Aranea cried. "Don't move!"

Noct glanced around him. There was a crack in the wall behind him which opened up into a larger cavern, hopefully one that _didn't_ sit on the edge of a bottomless pit. He squeezed through, thankful for once that he didn't have the kind of bulk his father had, and blinked up at a dazzling ceiling of stalactites covered in ice. 

He whistled low, and the sound bounced around the cavern, ringing like a chorus of birds. Noct took off his jacket and wiped some of the slime off his face, then wrapped the jacket around his middle and walked on. The next cavern was much like the first, but there weren't as many stalactites, and a number of them lay in pieces on the ground. Noct skirted around them and ducked into a wide tunnel, which glimmered and flashed with the light off his folded jacket.

"Hello," Noct called.

_Hello_

He smiled. "Make way for the Sword of the King," he said in Old Solheim.

_Sword of the King_

_the King_

"What's that?"

Noct froze. That voice didn't belong to him. It was light, a little soft, a muffled whisper that didn't end in the kind of howling tone Noct was making. Noct hurriedly switched off his light, but he wasn't fast enough to miss the skinny man in a black and silver hood peering into the mouth of the tunnel.

"Hey," the man said. "Turn it back on. There are daemons in here."

Noct shrank back.

The man took a step closer. Only his mouth was visible beyond the bright light shining from a square on his chest, and Noct raised an arm, shielding his eyes.

"Hold it," the man said. "You're just a kid."

Noct squinted at the man's uniform. A hood lined with silver thorns. Black jacket with bright buttons on either side of his chest. Well-made boots. 

"You're a Glaive," Noct said.

"That's right," the Glaive said, extending a hand. "I'm here to help."

Noct almost laughed. "I don't need help."

"Sure," said the Glaive. "Did you fall by the entrance? You're lucky you weren't hurt--come on, I'll lead you out." He paused. "My name's Pelna."

Noct sucked in air through his teeth. The Glaive didn't think he was a threat yet--maybe Noct could use that, just for a while. Long enough to get out of the tunnels and back to a place Noct could recognize from the map Ardyn showed him. Noct inched forward. "I lost something," he said. "I need to get it first."

"Alright," the man said. Noct reached out, and a large hand took his. "Keep behind me. If daemons show up, you'll need to hide."

"I've fought daemons before," Noct said. He turned on his light. The Glaive had taken his hood off, revealing mussed hair, an uncertain smile, and deep brown eyes. He wished he hadn't seen that. 

"Really? Maybe you should join the Glaive when you grow up. My nephew's about your age; He says he's--" He stopped as they entered another large cavern, filled with slopes and cliffs and dark tunnels. "Hell, kid, what happened to you?"

Noct looked down at his ruined clothes. "A flan happened."

"No." Pelna let go of his hand. "Your face."

Noct felt a momentary rush of panic--was he breaking out _already?_ \--and gingerly ran his hands over his face. Nothing. No bumps, no sore spots. "I don't feel anything," he said.

"What about that scar?" Pelna asked, nodding to Noct's cheek. "And the other one, on your... Shit."

Noct examined his arms. He never really thought of his scars being ugly or frightening before. They were just there, signposts of his past, proof that he was getting better with the sword. Now, he felt a slow roll of dread in his stomach. What if they _were_ ugly? What if it didn't matter if he got pimples, what if people like Aranea saw him and immediately thought, _No thanks, I like my men whole?_

"Has someone been hurting you?" Pelna asked.

Noct ran through what felt like an entire lifetime of study and came up grasping. "I. I was attacked by a Marilith. When I was a kid."

Pelna went very still. 

"The rest of it's normal," Noct said. "It's normal, it's just, it happens. I have to go. I need to find what--I left--"

"Wait," Pelna said. He laid a hand on Noct's shoulder, and Noct twisted away. Pelna's hand went to a small radio at his hip. "Nyx? Lib? I may have a code Caelum."

The radio hissed with static, and Noct staggered backwards. "What's a code Caelum?" He asked.

"It means we need to bring you somewhere safe," Pelna said. "Hold on. Don't run, I'm not gonna--"

Noct didn't wait for him to finish. He summoned a sword with a flash of light and warped towards one of the far tunnels. Pelna cursed behind him, and Noct heard footsteps pounding on the stone over the gasp of his own frantic breath. Light burst at his side, and Noct whirled, sword out, going for a shallow cut at arm's length. Just enough to slow him down.

The thing was, Noct was used to sparring with Ardyn, who fought like a fiend, or MTs, which had thick metal armor that always dulled his blade with every strike. Pelna didn't have armor, and he wasn't nearly as fast as Ardyn. What would have been a cut that grazed an MT dug into the meat of Pelna's belly, and when Noct fell back, blood followed, soaking his shoes.

"Oh, fuck," Pelna said, in a small, strange voice. He fell to his knees. Noct dropped his sword into his armiger and sank down with him, holding out his hands. He hadn't meant to strike him so hard. He hardly meant to hit his stomach. He hadn't...

"Don't," Pelna said, pushing Noct's hands away. "Don't look. Don't look, gods, kid, just stay where... stay where they can see you..."

"You shouldn't've told me your name," Noct said, trying to shove Pelna back together. "You should've just left me alone, I didn't--"

"They'll get you home," Pelna said. He was fading. Noct could see the color draining from his face as he spoke, the strength already gone from his limbs. He slumped on the stone, bleeding out at Noct's feet. "Wait there. They'll get you home."

Noct heard the boom of approaching footsteps and stood, his hands dripping with blood. Two men in Kingsglaive gear were running towards him, gaining fast. The one in back had a knife in his hand, and Noct turned, summoning a knife of his own.

"What the fuck is that?" one of them said. Noct closed his eyes and threw the knife, warping after it. There was a shout of alarm behind him, but he didn't turn to check. He kept going, turning down twisting tunnels, sliding under rubble, heart thrumming in his ears. He left his bloody shoes behind in a small cave filled with imps, and tried not to use his hands as he ran, shoving at the wall with his shoulder when he needed to break momentum to turn. He finally slid under a fallen stalactite, tucking himself into the shadows and turning off his light. He lay there for a long, long while, listening to the murmur of voices in the tunnels beyond.

"Magic," he heard one say, amid the incomprehensible muttering.

"Gone feral," said another.

"...by daemons?"

"The king."

Noct waited until the voices died, then slowly pushed himself to his feet. He recognized the layout of this cave, at least. If he kept to the right, he'd find his way back out, and hopefully Aranea would be there, waiting.

Hopefully she didn't take one look at him and leave him behind.

Aranea wasn't waiting outside. She was up a steep slope a ways into the cave system, scanning the room with her light. When she saw Noct, she surged forward with a sigh of relief. Noct expected her to recoil at the sight of him, but she just grabbed him by the shoulders and looked him up and down.

"What the ever loving fuck?" she asked.

"There's Kingsglaive," Noct said. His voice came out short, harsh as a crow's. "One of them's dead."

Aranea looked at Noct's hands. "You didn't..."

"He's dead," Noct said again. "And I didn't even get the sword."

"You're not going to," Aranea said. "We're calling a retreat."

Panic rose in Noct, choking him. "We can't! Dad said--I always finish the job."

"Not this time."

Aranea grabbed Noct by the wrist and tugged him forward. Noct tried not to notice the way bits of dried blood flaked off on her gloves, and tried to follow without stumbling, squinting in the sudden glare of the sun behind the waterfall. They ran for the ship together, and when Noct huddled up in the corner by the seats, not even bothering to buckle himself in, Aranea said nothing about it. She just took off, setting a course for Niflheim.

"Hey," she said, after the ship steadied itself out. "Sit with me, kid."

"Don't call me that," Noct whispered. Pelna had called him kid. Pelna had a nephew. Pelna told him to stay, said he'd be safe, said--

"Okay." Noct looked up. His vision swam, blurring Aranea's face as she knelt in front of him, a warm hand cupping his cheek. "It's okay. It wasn't your fault. Your dad should've had the caves scouted in the first place, anyways."

"I _am_ the scout," Noct whispered, but he wasn't sure if Aranea heard. She just ran her fingers behind his ear, stroking his hair back, and it was so like the way his dad used to hold him that Noct curled up tighter, head on his knees.

"I'll sort this with your dad," Aranea said. "I promise."

When the ship landed, Aranea wouldn't open the bay doors until Ardyn showed up. He took almost an hour, and when he got there, he just raised his brows at Noct like the worst Noct had done was lose his shoes.

"Did you find the sword?" he asked.

"Oh, you know what," Aranea said, stripping off her gloves, "fuck you."

It was a solid blow. Noct ran for her, holding her back with both hands, but Ardyn didn't seem to feel it. He touched his cheek, looked at Aranea, and smiled faintly. 

"You know I'll have to report this," he said.

"Yeah," she answered, shaking Noct off. "So will I."

In the end, Noct had to edge around Aranea to get to his father, who took off his large coat and draped it over Noct's shoulders. Noct tugged it close and followed at Ardyn's heels, trying to ignore Aranea cursing out her commanding officer in the background.

"I think," Ardyn said, "that Aranea's career in the imperial military will be cut woefully short after today."

Noct said nothing. Ardyn led him to their rooms, where Noct let the coat fall and nearly climbed into the shower with his clothes on before he remembered. Then he scrubbed himself clean, watching blood trickle down the drain and scrape off his skin in flakes. Then he examined the mirror again, trying to look at himself the way a stranger would.

The scar under his eye wasn't _that_ ugly, really, but it did make him look hard. Cold. 

_Murderer,_ whispered his thoughts, an echo to a crime he couldn't name. He remembered Pelna reaching out his hand. The slippery feeling of his stomach spilling open under his hands. His brown eyes going dim.

Ardyn opened the door by the time Noct had heaved up most of his breakfast, and knelt at Noct's side. He held back his hair, already long enough to tie back, and hummed softly to himself, a toneless buzz in Noct's ears. Noct was just retching now, shoulders heaving with nothing to show for it, and Ardyn clicked his tongue.

"Your first kill is always the hardest," he said. "It gets easier. At least they know to fear you now."

Noct closed his eyes. "He told me his name," he said.

"Ah. That would be your first mistake," Ardyn said, rubbing soothing circles over Noct's back. "Next time, you'll know better."


	10. Chapter 10

At night, the imperial keep in Gralea belonged to the MTs. The curving halls and suspended walkways thudded with the irregular footfalls of MT patrols, hissed with the motors that kept their armor secure, allowing spines to twist and arms to bend at unnatural angles. A whole squad of MTs crawled up the side of the wall as Noct passed through one of the warehouses, moving like spiders over the blinking monitors. One of them rotated their head to track Noct's progress, and Noct covered his head with his jacket hood, crouching low until the MT turned around again.

The training halls were immaculately clean. Noct had spilled plenty of his own blood on the floor, but no one had ever _died_ there. Except MTs, maybe, but their bodies were mostly rotted away by the time they were deployed, nothing but proto-daemons hooked up by wires and programmed to obey.

Or that's what Ardyn said, anyways.

Noct went to the storage lockers in the back and pulled out a polishing cloth and a can of cleaner, then sat with his back to the rail, holding his hands out before him.

Minutes passed. Pipes groaned overhead, twining around the heavy fans that beat out a rhythmic thrum into the silent keep. A heart, pumping blood. 

Noct summoned his sword.

There wasn't enough air in his armiger, he supposed, to dry out the blood on his blade, because drops of it landed on Noct's knees as the sword fell into his hands. He took a harsh breath, and reached for the can at his side.

There wasn't that much blood, really. There hasn't been time to rust out the blade, and the sword was polished to a shine within minutes, gleaming and flawless in Noct's hands.

He kept scrubbing, just in case.

He was still at it, head bowed over the blade, when he heard a voice murmuring in the distance.

"What is it, girl?" 

Ravus' voice was slurred with exhaustion, but unmistakable in his signature drawl, so much more affected than Noct's own accent. For a second, Noct saw something trot into the doorway, but the shadows were so close that he couldn't make out what it was. Then Ravus was there, dressed in thin pajama pants and nothing else, a dark, jagged scar trailing over his abs like lightning. Noct wondered how he got it.

"Noctis?" Ravus stepped inside. His hair was tied up in silvery clasps that made his hair hang in delicate loops over his face. For a second, he looked like one of the heroes from the picture books Noct could barely remember, the ones his dad used to read before, and it reminded him in a rush that Ravus was, in a way, still a prince.

Noct looked down at the killing weapon in his hands. 

"Ravus," he said, and clamped his mouth shut, looking up at the swirling fans. "I don't think we can be friends anymore."

Ravus lay a hand on the frame of the door. "Why would you say something like that?"

Noct just looked at his reflection in the sword, warped and smudged in the gloom. "You're a prince," he said. 

Ravus smiled crookedly. "Not an uncommon occurrence in Gralea, you'll find. I'm sure we'll manage to overcome it." He strode over, tightening the pins in his hair. He took in the rag next to Noct and stiffened. "Is that blood?"

"It isn't mine," Noct said, but his voice came out fainter than he meant it to. Ravus' brows snapped together. "I. Something happened, near Lestallum."

Ravus sat down in front of him, folding his legs like they did in the old illustrations in _The Long Game._ "Explain," he said.

The story spilled out of him, tumbling backwards and tripping over details, a long, uneven ramble that started with a man dying in the cold and ended with Noct, a killer, pretending to be friends with someone who shouldn't be dirtying his hands, someone who had his own game to run, someone who--

"Noct," Ravus said, taking his wrist. Noct blinked up at him, and Ravus gently pulled him to his feet. "It will be alright. I promise. I'll see this fixed."

Noct opened his mouth to tell Ravus that there wasn't really any way to fix a _person,_ when Ravus tugged him out of the training hall and slunk along the corridor, holding him tight. "Ravus? Where--" he jerked his wrist, but Ravus hung on. "What are you talking about?"

"Lunafreya will be fine," Ravus muttered, almost to himself. "If they kill her, they kill the sun itself. She'd disown me if I didn't, in any case."

"Didn't what? Gods, Ravus, let me go." Noct dug in his heels, but Ravus just looked down at him, a strange, desperate air to his eyes, and grabbed Noct around the waist. He hauled him over his shoulder, wrapping him in a death grip as Noct wriggled and cursed and tried to free his arms long enough to warp. They were heading up the winding stairway that led to the landing pads, and Noct jammed a knee in Ravus' stomach.

"What the hell?" he shouted. Ravus hissed for silence, and Noct raised his voice. "You can't just ask?"

"I'll explain on the ship," Ravus said. "We haven't the time. If your captor finds us--"

"My _dad,_ " Noct said. Ravus flinched.

"For the love of. For gods'... He tells you every day, Noctis! Noctis! It's his own sick, twisted way of reminding everyone who you are." Ravus wrenched at the handle to the door leading to the roof. "And who you are, _Noct,_ is--"

"My son," said a calm, cool voice at the foot of the stairs. Ravus' hand clenched in Noct's shirt.

There was a flash of light, red sparks bursting over them like the heart of a firework, and for an instant, the world _shifted._ It slowed, the edges of Noct's vision going blue and grey as he was thrown from Ravus' arms, and when Noct blinked, Ravus was leaning against the wall, hands grasping at the metal, staring at Ardyn with something like terror.

"Oh, bless," Ardyn said, patting Ravus on the cheek. "At least you tried."

"Dad?" Noct pushed himself up. "Ravus? How'd--how did we--"

Ardyn shifted his feet, and Ravus let out a low, strangled sound.

"Don't touch him," Ravus croaked.

Ardyn reached out a hand to stroke Noct's hair, and Noct looked between them, utterly lost. "Wait here," Ardyn said, tilting his head at Ravus. "If you move, I can't confirm that the MTs won't treat you as hostile after all. Noct, are you well? Did he hurt you?"

"No, he just." Noct looked at Ravus, who refused to meet his eyes. "I don't know."

"I fear our good friend Ravus has decided to show his true colors," Ardyn said, as the sound of MTs boomed up the stairs. They swarmed around them, circling Ravus, blocking him from view, enclosing Noct and Ardyn in their own bubble of metal armor and heavy boots. "He planned on taking you to Lucis."

Noct's breath caught in his throat. Of course. Ardyn once said that Ravus would do anything to get away from Niflheim, and Noct had... Noct had killed a Glaive. He was an enemy to Lucis, and Ravus, who saw Lucis as an impossible haven in a wasteland, had taken what small bargaining chip he could find. It made sense.

Ardyn kissed Noct on the forehead, and Noct closed his eyes as the MTs marched back down, carrying Ravus with them. It was for the best. He'd betrayed him. He would have seen him given to the Lucian king.

"Oh, Noct," Ardyn said, wiping hot, furious tears from Noct's cheeks. "So soft, even now."

"I'm sorry," Noct gasped.

"Yes," Ardyn said. "I'm sure you are."

The next morning, when Noct carried his first message from Ardyn to a general on the third floor, he overheard two aides talking. The royal forest of Tenebrae, blessed by the oracles since the first Nox Fleuret took on the title, had been burned to the ground at dawn. Noct struggled with pity, hovering in the hallway as the aides walked on, but as Ardyn said over dinner that evening, Ravus really should have known better. 

 

\---

 

It was the summer of Noct's fourteenth year, and the city of Lestallum lay before him, sunlight warming the stones of the long bridge leading into the main gate. Noct, standing in a field of overgrown wheat that tickled his shoulders, put his foot down on the back of a Kingsglaive soldier and drew his sword from between their ribs.

"Sorry," he whispered.

"Are you quite done?" Ardyn was just visible over the rise, leaning on a hideous white and mauve car with a plastic moogle jewel bobbing on the antenna. It was, in Noct's opinion, the kind of car that most dads got _just_ to embarrass their sons, and Ardyn treated it like some kind of precious artifact, too pure to be sullied by dirt or blood or feet on the dashboard.

"Boots in the armiger," Ardyn said, as Noct brushed detritus off his shoulders. "How many were there?"

"Just three this time," Noct said. "They're slowing down, I guess." He took off his boots and sent them to his armiger, then climbed barefoot into the passenger's seat. "Sure you don't want me to drive?"

Ardyn gasped. "And wreck the baby?"

"Oh my gods, dad, what the hell."

Ardyn slapped Noct's feet before he could prop them up, and Noct sighed, slumping into his seat. The king of Lucis had been sending more Glaives to guard the tombs until Noct turned fourteen, when he seemed to be content to have them hang out in the sidelines, watching Noct from the underbrush. Usually, Noct could get away with sneaking off before they tried to corner him, but this time, they'd come at him directly. 

He rolled his shoulder and tipped his head back to breathe in the fresh scent of honeysuckle. "We should stop in Lestallum!" he called. Ardyn raised a brow.

"And?"

"I dunno," Noct said. "Don't you ever just wanna go?"

"Not particularly."

Noct watched the fields flick by as Ardyn turned the radio to one of the worst stations, all synthetic pop and _alternative ska,_ and let his mind drift. The Disc remained a fixed point on the horizon, and the trees that flashed by had old, twisted branches and heavy trunks, dripping with moss.

Finally, when Noct sighed for the sixth time, Ardyn ground his teeth together and slowed the car to a stop.

"Very well," he said, and Noct whooped, scrambling over the seat. "Be careful! That's treated leather!"

Ardyn couldn't leave the driver's seat fast enough. Noct fell into his spot, hands on the wheel, foot lightly touching the accelerator. Ardyn grimaced and climbed into the passenger's seat, making a show of buckling himself in.

"Now," Ardyn said, as Noct, practically vibrating with excitement, grabbed the clutch. "The first thing you have to do is--"

"Hit it," Noct said, and slammed on the pedal. The car lurched forward, engine roaring, and as Ardyn held down his hat with one hand and clung to the dashboard with the other, Noct let out a loud, raucous yell, his voice echoing through the foothills. 

"Hell's teeth," Ardyn said, as the car swerved around a bend, tires squealing. "I do believe you'll be the death of me after all."

Noct laughed and spun the wheel, doing an illegal u-turn on a one-way street. 

"The tomb is in the other direction!" Ardyn reached across the seat for the wheel, and Noct summoned a wall between them, formed of pure magic. Ardyn scowled and slowly pushed himself through.

"Yeah," Noct said, "but the chocobos are this way. Come on, Dad! The Glaive are down by three. Let's go look at something yellow and fluffy."

"I cannot believe," Ardyn said, in a dry, deadened tone, "that you and I share the same blood."

Noct winked and careened into the dirt road leading towards the chocobo post, grinning with all the joy of a fourteen-year-old with no license, bare feet, and the keys to his father's car.


	11. Chapter 11

When Noct was fifteen, he stole his father's car.

Well, it wasn't stealing, really, not the way most people would have considered it. Noct was supposed to take the car along the narrow, empty road to the sea, and had simply taken a small detour on the way. A detour that led him into a throng of people milling about in the streets of Lestallum, laughing and shouting and wearing white robes while food vendors set up shop on either side. Noct parked illegally behind a dumpster and ducked into a small shop full of robes and costumes and kitschy snow globes, and came back out with a stolen robe over his shoulders and a hood over his head to hide his face. 

"Try your luck with the leap of faith!" someone shouted, and Noct looked up to find a makeshift platform standing over the lookout, with a wide trampoline below covered in hay. "Face the terror of inevitable death! Brace yourself for the greatest test of skill and mettle!"

Noct grinned. He'd taken higher falls than that at the age of _ten._ Still, there was something about the way they spoke that drew Noct closer, edging around the crowd of festival-goers towards the man with the megaphone.

"Good sir!" the man shouted, and Noct jumped. The megaphone was pointed directly in his face. "Have you ever wanted to be a true assassin?"

Noct laughed. What was _that_ supposed to mean? "Sure," he said. "Why not." He pointed to the platform, and the man bowed him towards a deceptively sturdy ladder. Noct climbed, still smiling to himself, and looked out over the city. Banners flapped in the wind. Smoke rose from a hundred different stoves, people were walking over bridges and pipes between roofs, and there was someone prancing around in a massive chocobo costume, terrifying small children. Noct wondered if this was something Lestallum did all the time. It was nothing like the cold, quiet city of Gralea, or the somber, unchanging seasons of the keep. He climbed onto the top of the platform, where a woman was holding a harness attached to a cord.

"Alright," she said. "Here are the rules."

"Yeah, I'm good," Noct said, and before she could stop him, leaped off the platform into the air.

The rush of wind that met him was thick with the scent of spices, and the shout of the crowd rose around him as he fell. He landed with a thump just where he was supposed to, and was thrown back up a few feet, surrounded by a fine cloud of hay. Noct laughed, and when he finally stopped bouncing, clambered off the trampoline and onto asphalt that bucked under him.

"You little shit," said the man with the megaphone, almost affectionately. He thrust a handful of coins in Noct's hands. "You wanna put on a demo to reel people in, kid, you come to me."

"Sure," Noct said. He tottered off, coins heavy in his hand, and drifted towards the stairs.

There were more stalls there, mostly food trucks with pop-up stands out front and trays of steaming meat and fried pastries, and Noct dropped a coin on a table and got a stick of some kind of meat glazed with reddish sauce. He took it--and the complimentary flatbread--to one of the quietest picnic tables and sat in the corner, gingerly taking a bite.

It was possibly the most amazing thing Noct had eaten in his life.

"Oh my gods," he said, and a man at the table glanced up, grinning a little. He swallowed down an entire chunk of meat and closed his eyes, savoring the unfamiliar spices that tickled his tongue.

Maybe more than tickled, come to think of it. Noct blinked, thrown off by the burn slowly spreading in his mouth, and lunged for the bread. The man at the table laughed.

"First time eating Galahdian food?" he asked.

"Thish ish Galahfmnmn?" Noct said, through a mouthful of bread. The man smiled. He had an easy grin, and Noct's gaze traveled along the line of his jaw, the braids in his hair, the small crow's foot tattoo under one eye.

"Yeah," said a man next to him. He was heavier-set, with muscular arms that could probably snap someone's spine if he wanted to. "They sure seem to like our food, at least."

"Is this a Galahdian festival, then?" Noct asked when he could finally breathe. He tugged at his hood, taking care to keep his face in shadow. "I don't remember reading anything about assassins when I studied them. I thought only Lucis was obsessed with death."

The larger man snorted. The first one who spoke smiled again, and Noct fiddled with his skewer, cheeks flushing with heat. Gods, he was hopeless. 

"You're right," the man said. "This isn't Galahdian. It's for some kind of game that just came out. Thing is, Galahd's exotic, right--" his friend rolled his eyes, "so they're throwing some sauce on anak meat and calling it culture. But give it another ten minutes, and they'll probably be telling us to clear out for real customers."

"Can't have the immigrants hanging around the Galahdian quarter," his friend said, and laughed. "Hey, Nyx, I'm gonna dance. You up?"

"Gods, no."

"Yeah, figured. Better to know you're outclassed now than face defeat later," he said, and winked. Nyx kicked him, but he got up anyways, heading for a group of musicians on a wooden stage.

Nyx. That was an odd name. Noct felt like he'd heard it before, somewhere, but he couldn't quite place it. He watched the other man take the hand of a young woman by the stage and sighed. For a moment, he almost wished Ravus were there, but Ravus hadn't been allowed within fifty feet of Noctis for years. The last Noct heard, Ravus had only just clawed his way back up to Captain, anyways, so he probably wouldn't want to do something as frivolous and time-consuming as a festival.

Which reminded Noct of his father's car, hidden away behind a dumpster when it was supposed to be halfway to the beach by now. He groaned softly and shoved the rest of the skewer in the flatbread, turning it into a makeshift wrap.

"You're here on vacation?" Nyx asked. Noct looked up, startled. He wasn't used to people trying to start up a conversation. He still got orders, sure, from people who were too used to seeing him as Ardyn's message-runner, but most people in Gralea tended to keep their distance. Noct stared, and Nyx cleared his throat. "Your accent. Sounds like... Tenebrae? Maybe?"

"Yeah," Noct lied. "Close by. I, uh. I'm here for work. I mean, I'm not _here_ for work, I'm actually supposed to be somewhere else, but I'm. Here. The, uh. The signs looked... nice?"

Nyx's smile was, in Noct's opinion, patently unfair. It made everything he did look like some private assurance, a quiet conversation between old friends. Noct felt like a cornered rabbit, caught in the glare of oncoming headlights.

"Hey, it's okay to have fun sometimes," Nyx said. "That's what we're doing."

"I really should be getting back, though," Noct said. He stood, and a gust of wind stirred the banners around them, pushing Noct's hood back. Noct scrambled to tug it down again. Nyx didn't seem to have noticed, though. He just looked up at him, still smiling, and rubbed the shell of his right ear.

"Don't run off," he said. "The sun hasn't even set--you should get a look at the night sky over the Disc before you go."

Noct risked a smile of his own. "I've seen it," he said. "Out on the Slough."

"Gorgeous, right?" Nyx leaned on one elbow, still fiddling with his ear. "It doesn't beat the view from Galahd, but it's close."

"I've never..." Noct slowly eased himself back down. "Never heard much about Galahd, really. Just the basics."

"It's something else," Nyx said. "My friend and I there, we used to have a bar near one of the oldest mountains on the islands. Tourists used to climb it every winter, because when the skies cleared, it was like you could see the whole galaxy spread out over the ocean."

His voice was soft, and his gaze drifted slightly as he spoke, looking over Noct's shoulder. The crowd was starting to get thicker around them, voices calling out over the music, but Noct was transfixed, thinking of a high mountain on a distant shore, the universe unfolding around it.

"There's a reason the best philosophers come from Galahd and Leide," Nyx said. "The night opens you up, almost. Makes you rethink your place in the grand scheme of things."

Noct smiled, a little ruefully. "Not a luxury many can afford," he said.

"Why's that?" Nyx said. 

"Well." Noct twisted his fingers together. "I don't know. Sometimes you can't change who you are, or what you're meant for. Maybe you _do_ want to, oh, do something else, like..." He stopped. He couldn't think of what he'd want, if he weren't Ardyn's sword. A sharp sting of panic lanced through him. "I. I don't know."

Nyx waited.

"An artist, I guess," Noct said at last, thinking of the drawings on his wall. "But sometimes it doesn't work out. You have duties, or a family, and everything else gets kind of pushed aside."

"That's when you ask for help," Nyx said, and Noct felt a shadow pass over his back. He twisted round to see a woman with a mass of dark hair inch around him, taking a seat on his left side. "It's okay to ask. You don't have to do everything by yourself, you know."

Noct glanced behind him. There were more people there, many of them with the same style of tattoos as Nyx, milling around the picnic table with deliberate nonchalance. Noct slowly got to his feet, nerves screaming in alarm, and pushed away from the table.

"You don't have to run, your highness," Nyx said. 

" _What?"_ Noct stumbled back, and Nyx's eyes widened. "What'd you call me?" 

Nyx stood. "It's okay," he said. The others shifted forward, and Noct frantically counted them. Twelve. Maybe thirteen, all in civilian clothes. _Glaives._ "I know you're scared, but we aren't your enemy."

"Then leave me _alone,_ " Noct said. 

"You're confused," one of the others said. "That's okay. If you sit down, we can explain."

Noct let out a short huff of a laugh. Right. Sit down, and let them cuff him, or kill him, or take him straight to the king to face whatever they called justice. Noct summoned a knife, and the Glaives all moved as one, rocking on their feet, shifting their weight, looking to each other for guidance. 

Noct warped ten feet in the air, and emerged in a flash of light to find Nyx already there, gripping Noct's knife by the handle with his free hand. Noct cursed and phased out of his grip, abandoning his knife to throw one of the coins he won off the diving platform. It soared through the air, right over the edge of the lookout, and as Noct warped to meet it, he rubbed his hands together and covered his face with both hands, letting his magic trickle over him. It was an old trick, one that always made Noct nauseous as hell afterwards, but when Noct warped to the ground below, he could hear Nyx's voice over the din.

"He's cloaked himself!"

Noct hit the ground running. He didn't dare warp again--magic would be too obvious to miss--and kept to the short grasses, footsteps light. He finally stopped near a haven by the Slough, where he tucked himself between the crackling spires of a fire magic deposit, which slowly fed into the cloaking spell that kept him hidden. He lay there for hours, well past sunset, but no one came for him. When the magic of the deposit had run out at last, Noct rolled onto his back and stared up at the stars. 

"They really are nice," he whispered, and covered his face with an arm, letting the screech of cicadas overwhelm the memory of Nyx's quiet, wistful voice, and the vision of a mountain by the sea, swallowed by stars.

 

\---

 

In the end, Noct had to leave the car behind. He hitched a ride with a gardener heading towards Caem, sitting in the back of her truck surrounded by potted flowers, and left his stolen robe back at the haven, tucked under a stone. He jumped off close to the thicket where the latest tomb was supposed to be, and waved at the gardener as she took off down the road. He could do this. With the Glaive combing Lestallum, no one would possibly think of searching for him here, out in the middle of nowhere.

Noct trudged up the path, listening to the rustle of squirrels in the underbrush, and hoped that he could make it to the tomb in time. His father had given him three days--If Noct hadn't reported back by then, Ardyn would send a drop-ship of MTs after him to drag him off to Gralea. That had only happened once, when Noct got so lost that he almost cried when he saw the ship descending over the rocky slopes of Ravatogh. He didn't think he could face Ardyn's full disappointment a second time. Especially not with the car stuck in Lestallum.

Noct was just starting to get into his stride when he heard a crash of breaking branches to his right. He darted behind the trees, crouching low to the ground, as two young men almost his age walked onto the path.

"That's the last time I take your advice," one of them said, dusting off his striped shirt. He was a tall young man with ash-blond hair, a pair of glasses slipping down his nose, and boots that looked too new to belong to a seasoned hiker. "Just a shortcut, Ignis. We'll be there in no time, Ignis."

"Shut up, I was right," said his companion. He was taller still, if that was possible, with long brown hair and the kind of muscle definition that reminded Noct of Ardyn, just a little. Unlike his friend, he wasn't wearing a shirt at all, and a beaded necklace banged against his chest with every step. "We got here, didn't we?"

"And your father will kill us if he finds out we came," Ignis said. "If we aren't killed ourselves."

"Bullshit," his companion said. "You were best friends. _We_ were best friends. Sort of. Or we could've been. We'll be fine."

"Famous last words," Ignis drawled, and they passed up the slope, disappearing round the corner. Noct held his breath. They seemed too young to be Glaives, but after Lestallum, he couldn't be sure. Noct would just have to be careful and keep off the path, that was all. Hopefully they were just some teenagers on a camping trip, and Noct could sneak in, claim another Lucian weapon for his own, and sneak out without anyone catching on.

"Right," he whispered, facing the dark, unwelcoming tangle of the woods beyond. "Easy as that."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Glaive have a whole list of coded phrases if they spot or engage with Noctis, and "night sky" is one of them.


	12. Chapter 12

Noct didn't know what to make of the hikers tramping their way through the thicket, disrupting the peaceful silence with every gallumphing step. The entire forest was alerted to their presence; Flocks of birds rose from the trees to his right, animals fled in their wake, and every now and then, Noct could hear the crack and snap of branches and twigs crunching underfoot. If they _were_ agents of Lucis, it was almost embarrassing. They were at least Noct's age, but they acted like... well...

Like children.

"It's the legs that do it for me," the shirtless one was saying, when Noct ventured close enough to see them sauntering along the trail. "And she's studying Gainsborough's Theorem, did you know? She's writing her dissertation on it."

Ignis batted at his arm. "She's a bit old for you, Gladio," he said.

"Thirty isn't old," Gladio pointed out. Noct wondered if he'd noticed that Ignis' ears were unnaturally pink. "Thirty is distinguished. Wise. Like, like wine--"

"Good gods, you are not comparing women to alcohol," Ignis snapped. Gladio grinned at him, and Ignis covered Gladio's mouth with a hand. "No." Gladio licked his hand, and Ignis recoiled with a shout. Noct, hidden behind a bush, narrowed his eyes. Was this _normal_ behavior? 

They went on like that for some time. Noct learned that Ignis, according to Gladio, took too many risks, particularly with his uncle's new car. He learned that Gladio had a little sister who worshipped idols (they _did_ that in Lucis?) and that Gladio, for all that his voice was low and rich for his age, couldn't hold a tune for love nor money. 

He also learned why they were there in the first place.

"Remember," Ignis said, as he passed a wrapped sandwich to Gladio under a large oak. "His Majesty's reports showed that he's at least marginally aware of his lineage, so we can use that to our advantage in a pinch."

Noct, high in the branches overhead, slowly eased himself closer.

"He knows enough to use the tombs, anyways," Gladio said. "So what do we do? Call him _your highness?_ "

Ignis looked down at his hands. "I always called him Noct," he said, in a small, quiet voice. 

Why would Ignis call him anything? Noct peered down at them, trying to read their faces. Gladio looked pained, withdrawn, and Ignis had that blank, relaxed sort of expression Noct got sometimes, when the night came and he found himself yearning for his old home, for the track filled with wildflowers and the blue sky creeping in from all sides. He held back a sudden, mad urge to call out to them, and bit his lip hard enough to break the skin.

"Come on," Gladio said. "Time's wasting. If he isn't here, he's at the other one, in the swamp."

"Please, gods, not the swamp," Ignis said. Noct watched them go, and when they'd gone far enough away for their voices to fall soft, Noct dropped to the path.

Gladio paused, shoulders rising.

"Shit," Noct whispered, and threw himself into the bushes. He was well into the shadows by the time Gladio and Ignis doubled back, and set a course for the tomb, trying to ignore the thorns that dragged at his clothes and the burrs sticking to his boots. Ardyn had given him three days to find the tomb, and Noct had spent the first following a false lead, the second fucking around in Lestallum, and now he had hours at most before an MT drop ship appeared to haul him back to Ardyn. But if he had to avoid the path, he'd get nowhere. 

Noct turned towards the path. Somewhere, there were two Lucians thinking about him like he was some sort of _puzzle,_ taking up the path and laughing and talking to each other like stealth was something _other_ people had to worry about. And there Noct was, waist-deep in ferns, with nothing to eat all day but a granola bar in the back of a gardener's truck, tired and worn and desperate to go _home._

"Fuck it," Noct said, and summoned his sword. He hacked at the ferns, pushing his way back onto the path, and quickly brushed bits of leaves from his hair and shoulders. Ignis and Gladio were far ahead, almost out of sight, and Noct let out a shrill, ear-splitting whistle.

"Hey!" Noct shouted. He strode towards them, and couldn't help but smile at their dumbstruck faces, the way their shoulders fell slack, their empty hands at their sides. "Why don't we just move past the subterfuge and get this out of the way?" He stopped to bow, and grinned when Ignis almost bowed back. "You already know my name, for some reason. _You're_ Ignis and Gladio, and I'm under arrest or trespassing on royal grounds or wanted for possession of magic--I don't really care--and you're here to take me in. Right? Right."

Ignis' mouth dropped open.

"This is usually the time when people try to run me through," Noct said, helpfully.

"No one's tryin' to kill you," Gladio said.

Ignis made a strange sound, halting and muffled. "Noct?" he asked. He smoothed out his hair, which now hung limp over his eyes. "Noct, I--"

"Don't think he remembers us," Gladio said.

"And I definitely would, if I saw you before," Noct said. "No one--" Ignis took off his glasses, running a hand under his right eye. His eyes were remarkably green, almost blue in the right light, and Noct stammered, suddenly lost. "No one makes as much noise as you do."

"I'm sorry, Iggy," Gladio said, and Noct felt something stir in his chest, a physical pull that made his breath hitch. "We'll have to go with plan B."

"Fighting," Noct said, hefting his sword. "It's always fighting."

Ignis sighed and replaced his glasses. It was a shame. Noct didn't really want to kill them. They weren't like the Glaives Noct usually fought, all boundless confidence and years of training. They were--

Noct grunted as Gladio, light falling about his hands as he gripped a massive sword, swung his blade into the path, kicking up a cloud of dust. Noct clamped his mouth shut and covered his eyes, but Ignis was already there, darting forward with something wrapped in his hands, a rope, _fuck,_ he hadn't even _warped,_ how the hell did he move so fast?

Noct raised his sword as soon as a shadow crossed his periphery, but wasn't expecting Gladio to move so fluidly, like a dancer ducking under his blade. Ignis got a length of rope around Noct's right hand, but Noct wrenched him loose, only to feel the cold, sharp bite of metal around his wrist.

There was a faint _click._ Noct looked down at the handcuff around his left wrist, linked tightly to one snapped around Gladio's, and tugged at the chain. It looked sturdy enough to hold back a Garula, but Gladio hadn't enough time to tighten the cuff, and there was the slightest bit of give. Noct grabbed his thumb with his right hand and braced himself.

The dull crack of Noct's hand breaking was enough to make both Ignis and Gladio freeze, faces falling into twin masks of horror. Sweat poured down Noct's back as he yanked his hand through, catching skin, tearing bloody stripes over his wrist, and when he fell away, holding his sword in his one good hand, Ignis and Gladio just stared at him.

"Noct," Ignis said, in a distant voice. "You..."

Gladio was the first to move, but Noct was already summoning his radio, jamming shaking fingers on the code to his father's line. 

"Dad," he said. Gladio barreled into him, holding him down with one arm while another jammed a shield in the dirt, blocking Noct from escape. "Dad! I'm gonna need a ship! Dad!"

"Break it," Gladio roared, and Ignis stamped hard on the radio with his heel. Noct kicked out, but it was like his knees were connecting with a solid wall. Gladio pinned him there, helpless, unable to move, and Noct arched his back in a last ditch attempt at escape as Ignis hurried over.

"Potion," Ignis said, and took Noct's hand. Noct hissed out a short breath, and Ignis cast him a worried look. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Noct, it'll be a moment." He broke something in his fist, and cool water poured over Noct's hand, flushing away the worst of the pain. He could still feel the twinge of a broken bone, but the scraping, harsh pain of his stripped skin was gone. Noct could think clearly again, even with Gladio holding him in place.

Noct summoned fire to his hands, and Gladio yelped. He leaned back, just enough, and Noct scrambled out from under him and ran. 

Ignis caught up to him in less than ten paces. Noct went down hard, rolling in the dust, and landed on his broken hand. He howled and clawed at Ignis, sword forgotten, and Ignis grabbed his wrist.

"Who the fuck _are_ you?" Noct wailed, and winced as something wet dripped on his cheek. He looked up, utterly stricken, as heavy tears slid down Ignis' nose and fogged his glasses. "Gods, who sent you? You're just a couple of kids."

"So are you," Ignis said, and Noct's stomach clenched. He kicked Ignis in the side and rolled to his feet. They were a two-minute flight from the closest garrison. If Ardyn got Noct's call in time, maybe--maybe he just had to hold out.

There was a rush of wind as the trees around them began to bend, and Gladio shouted a warning to Ignis. Noct looked up just in time for an MT anchor to go skittering down towards him, slicing a line down his jaw and neck. He reeled, and a second anchor struck him in the chest, hooking hard claws in the meat of his left shoulder and right hip.

"Grab him!" Gladio cried, and latched himself around Noct, trying to hold him down. But MTs were dropping like ants over the lip of the carrier, and Gladio had to let go as one of them slashed at his face with a spiked gauntlet, spraying blood.

The last thing Noct heard, through the chaos of the two men fighting a squad of MTs while Noct was lifted into the carrier, was the sound of an anguished voice calling his name.

Ardyn met him at the landing pad on the roof two hours later. Noct gave up trying to stand a few minutes in, and was lying back against the bay doors, his shirt reduced to strips tied around his gouged waist and hip. He smiled weakly at Ardyn, who, for once, didn't seem to mind the mess Noct was making as he gathered him into his arms.

"Sorry," Noct said, his voice a low, slurred drawl. "Got the better of me this time."

"You fool," Ardyn said, but his heart wasn't in it, really. He stroked the back of Noct's head, and lifted him in his arms the way he used to, when Noct was young and fell asleep at dinner or passed out during training. Noct let his head fall back, relishing the moment, and closed his eyes. His wounds throbbed with his heartbeat, and he didn't even hear the people rushing around him as Ardyn bore him to the elevator. All he heard was that steady thrumming, and the short, quick beat of his father's footsteps.

He drifted in and out for a while, aware only of hands on his chest, water in a basin, the sting of antiseptic. For a moment, he could have sworn that Ardyn himself was stitching his shoulder back together, but when he tried to focus, he sank back into an uneasy sleep. 

He woke at last in his own room, surrounded by sketches of tombs and cats and chocobos, with Ardyn waiting in a chair by his bedside.

"You're always there when I'm hurt," Noct said. He felt like he was speaking through water. Even his head was swamped, like his brain was sloshing about, unable to latch onto anything for long. "Every time. Always right--" he lifted his hand and winced. There was a cast over his wrist, and a thick white pad on his shoulder, another on his waist. 

"Take it easy," Ardyn said, and smiled. "For once."

"Ouch." Noct smiled back. His neck pinched as he did, an unpleasant burn running from his jaw to his collar. "Dad. Something they said about me. Something strange."

"What's that, Noct?" Ardyn asked. Noct looked away.

"They called me highness," he said. Ardyn shifted in his seat, crossing his legs. "Said I must've known my heritage if I was going to the tombs. Why would they say that, Dad? There are plenty of other ways to, to confuse someone."

Ardyn was silent for a long moment, gazing at the wall over Noct's head. "Dad?" Noct asked again.

"Yes, I heard you," Ardyn said. He sighed, and leaned forward to push aside Noct's bangs. "Noct. Dear one. I may not have been... entirely honest with you. About who you are. Who _I_ am." His gaze softened, golden eyes gleaming in the lamplight. "But you're a man now. You're old enough to know."

"I believe, Noct, that it's time I told you the truth."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahahahahahahahahahaha


	13. Chapter 13

Ardyn Lucis Caelum was seven years old when the goddess came to him. She wore the wide sleeves of a woman from Ardyn's village, and her white hair fell in dozens of braids over her shoulders, clinking with ice as she moved. When she spoke, her voice was soft, hardly like human speech at all, and Ardyn had to hold very still just to make out the words.

"Okay," he said, stuffing a small, bright green apple in his cloak, which was already drooping with the weight of at least a dozen more. His knees were scraped raw by tree bark, and his shoes were falling apart at the seams, the pink shells of his toes peeking out through the stitches. He tossed an apple down to the goddess, who held it in both hands.

"Are you certain?" she asked.

"Yeah!" Ardyn slithered down the tree, careful not to bump his makeshift bag. "Mom says I already heal really good. I fixed a baby chocobo two weeks ago! Her name's Alexandra. I love her. Do you want to see her?"

"I must tell the others that you have agreed to the contract," the goddess said. Frost formed on her lips as she spoke.

"See Alexandra first," Ardyn said. "She's almost as big as me now."

The goddess smiled, a small and uncertain quirk to the lips. "As you wish, your majesty," she said. 

Ardyn laughed and took her by the sleeve, dragging her down the hill towards the small, squat village far below.

 

\---

 

"Hi," said Ardyn Lucis Caelum, age nine, stepping into the hall of one of the old royal houses of Solheim. A great throne stood at the heart of the hall, with a woman draped over it, one foot tapping in time to the sound of a girl playing guitar. The girl stopped as Ardyn approached, looking fearfully from him to the woman.

The woman glanced Ardyn's way. She had a black tinge to the corners of her eyes, and her nails were grey, little tendrils of ashen sickness eating away at what was once healthy brown skin.

"A peasant boy," she said, and looked back to the ceiling. 

"No, but that's okay," Ardyn said, and, without so much as a by-your-leave, put both hands on her face.

It was Ardyn's older brother Somnus who found him later, chained to the floor of the great hall's dungeons and holding court with a crowd of attentive prisoners. They were all underfed, certainly, but there was a glow to their skin and a light in their eyes that shouldn't have been there, not with plague running through the countryside like a wave. Ardyn looked up when Somnus appeared and smiled.

"Hey, Somnus," he said, and all the prisoners looked his way. "Sorry for the trouble. I made some friends, though!"

In the end, almost all of the prisoners stayed with Ardyn, making up a sort of bedraggled, gangly honor guard. His closest companion was a boy about his age who'd been locked away for his father's debts; Gilgamesh, a quiet little fellow with thick white hair that fell in natural curls over his shoulders. He and Ardyn shared a chocobo on the way home, and when Somnus suggested they bring Gilgamesh back to his parents, the two boys grabbed each other's hands.

"You can't get rid of him," Ardyn said, scowling at his brother. "Gil's my Shield now."

"We decided," Gil said, and Somnus whispered a soft, hopeless prayer.

"You can't just walk into a noble's hall and heal them without an explanation, little man," Somnus said. "And you can't just recruit... Children, or criminals. You need to understand the _rules._ When we get back, I'm lending you one of my books."

"Somnus wants to be a philosopher," Ardyn explained to Gil, twisting up his face in disgust. Gil smiled.

"You'll see what I mean one day, Ardyn," Somnus said, nonplussed. He tied back his long black hair and fell onto his pallet, staring up at the overcast sky. "The world's a lot more dangerous than you think."

 

\---

 

"I didn't mean to kill them!" 

Gilgamesh stood in the dunes of Duscae, just short of the high, jagged mountains that circled the Disc. He was tall for a twelve-year-old, his shoulders too broad for his skinny legs, and he shifted uncomfortably in his new boots, which were already a little tight in the toe. At his feet, Ardyn was scrabbling at the dirt, drawing up strands of the Scourge as it bubbled and burned away in the sunlight.

"I need to bring them back," Ardyn said. He was crying, loud and ugly and embarrassing--Gilgamesh never knew what to do when Ardyn cried. _He_ hadn't shed a tear since that first night in the cells, after his father had looked him up and down, weighing the cost of keeping him fed to the debts piled on his door, and said, _He's old enough._ It was like all the tears in the world had run through him, then, sucked up by the dry dirt of the dungeon, and now, he couldn't even remember what it felt like.

"You can't bring them back when they're killed, Ardyn," he said, as Ardyn wept into the ash at his knees.

"But that's my job," Ardyn said. "I'm supposed to _heal_ them. I'm supposed to make them _human_ again."

"You can't heal everyone," Gil said, but Ardyn wasn't listening. He stood, his dark red hair hanging in his eyes, and ran a hand over his face.

"I'll do better next time," he whispered. "I promise, Gil. I promise."

 

\---

 

When Ardyn returned home for the first time, he stopped before a high sandstone wall and scratched his chocobo's neck, frowning slightly.

"There used to be an apple tree here," he said. Gilgamesh shrugged, but a number of Ardyn's other guards--former criminals, bastard children of noble houses, and homeless commoners, drawn to Ardyn like a comet to the sun--nodded and whispered to each other, trying to interpret Ardyn's words. They were always trying to find a hidden meaning, even when Ardyn was just talking about dinner or complaining at the end of a long ride, and quiet debates were already forming over the symbolism of apples and walls.

Ardyn paid them no mind. He rode around the wall until he reached the front gate, where guards in polished armor raised their spears in a salute. Young men and women appeared as the gate rose, holding baskets of flowers on their hips, and tossed blossoms before Ardyn's path, coating the street. Flowers fell from high windows that hadn't been there before, from houses Ardyn didn't recognize, from balconies and walkways and spiraling stairs. He smiled as Gilgamesh brushed a flower out of his hair, and leaned over to tuck one behind his ear.

"It suits you," Ardyn said.

Gilgamesh raised the mask covering the top part of his face--marred with acid from a monster in a mine several years before--and flashed Ardyn a private smile. Ardyn grinned back, and the crowds surged around them, calling his name.

He reached the small square where his mother's hut used to be and pulled his chocobo to a halt.

"So good to see you, little brother," Somnus said, holding out his arms. He stood before a high building, two towers half-built with rickety scaffolding and construction workers rappelling down wires, and his robes were a deep, expensive black.

"Somnus," Ardyn said, slipping off his chocobo. "What the hell have you done to our house?"

Somnus laughed. "Isn't it wonderful?"

"It's definitely something," Ardyn said. "And what are you supposed to be? A priest?"

"A senator," Somnus said, plucking at his robes. "Or that's what they call me. Come in, Ardyn, just wait until you see your throne room."

Ardyn politely smiled and _oohed_ his way through a quick tour, leaving his followers to take up residence in the spare rooms throughout what Somnus called his Citadel. He stared at the high throne and clapped Somnus on the back, looking every bit the nineteen-year-old king he was meant to be, and disappeared to vomit into the privy.

Gilgamesh found him there, shaking and retching over a hole in a stone bench.

"Did you notice?" Ardyn asked in a weak voice. "Indoor plumbing. What a wondrous age we live in."

"Yes, I can see you're fully appreciating the experience," Gil said, and Ardyn chuckled darkly. "Not so sure you want to sit on that fancy throne, are you?"

"Don't be daft," Ardyn said, wiping his mouth. He fumbled to the sink and turned on a tap. "Amazing."

"You looked like you were about to piss yourself," Gilgamesh said, as Ardyn furiously washed out his mouth. Gil's mask was gone, but despite the scars that ran over his eyes and forehead, Ardyn could tell that he was angry. "Somnus should have warned you."

"The gods warned me," Ardyn said. "I've been prepared for this since I was seven."

Gilgamesh dropped to his knees, and Ardyn pressed back against the sink. "Then I beg your forgiveness, your highness."

"No," Ardyn said.

"What's that, sire?" Gilgamesh asked.

"Stop that."

"At once, your highness."

Ardyn grabbed Gilgamesh by the shoulders, trying to haul him to his feet. "You've made your point, damn you."

Gilgamesh rose, dragging Ardyn into a one-armed hug. Ardyn dug his nails into the back of Gilgamesh's shirt and sighed. "You seemed to like the trip here well enough."

"Oh, adoration I can handle," Ardyn said. "But that throne... It isn't something I would have chosen."

"Yeah?"

"I would have a throne in a field somewhere," Ardyn said. "Made of rowan, maybe--Those are sacred enough. Perhaps a tent for the sun."

Gilgamesh paused for a moment, and Ardyn let himself sink into his hold, breathing in the sharp scent of leather and scale. "Yes. I can see that. Maybe we'll make that your official throne, and leave the other one for your brother."

"Gods, he's ambitious enough," Ardyn said, pulling away at last. "Let's not encourage him."

 

\---

 

The sickness appeared when Ardyn hit his twenties. By the time he was twenty-five, calling on his healing magic felt like pulling a bucket through a mile of sludge, and left him gasping and sweating, grey liquid trickling from his eyes and mouth as he absorbed the plague that tore through his patients. Once, a young woman begged him not to heal her, clasping his clammy hands in hers.

"Please," she said. The Scourge had already eaten her eye, turning it a purplish black. "Please, my lord, you shouldn't do this to yourself. Not for me."

Ardyn lay his hand on her cheek, and she shook her head, clinging to him as the Scourge slowly oozed its way into his fingers.

"Don't fret," he said, but the voice that came from him was hoarse, too low, unlike his own. "It'll be over soon."

"I'm so sorry," the woman had said, and Ardyn, when he curled up in his camp that night, shuddered as his face crawled with the viscous black blood of the Scourge.

 

\---

 

Somnus was waiting for him when Ardyn returned again.

His guard was gone. It was hard, Ardyn knew, to watch one's savior scream and writhe and howl with the voice of a daemon, lashed to a stone by Gilgamesh as he rode out the after-effects of a healing. No one could blame them for running. No one at all. So Ardyn came with Gil at his side, through a gate with twice as many guards, walking quietly through streets swept clean. His chocobo was long gone, poor thing, lost to the Scourge, and Gil had set his loose outside the wall.

The doors to the Citadel were open, and when Ardyn walked through, he felt the tickle of ice on the back of his neck that heralded the coming of his favorite goddess. He held out a hand, and hers formed around it, ice crackling up her arm as her body took form.

"Oh, my child," she said.

"I just need to be cleansed," he said, squeezing her fingers. He could barely feel the cold radiating from her hand. "Then I can go back. It's. It's hard, Shiva."

"I'm sorry," Shiva said. "We'll do what we can."

"What you--" Ardyn suppressed a surge of fury. It came so often, these days, that bestial rage, rising like bile in his throat. "What you can?"

"Easy, Ardyn," Gilgamesh said. Ardyn closed his eyes for a moment, then nodded. Shiva tugged him forward, up the high stairs to the throne room.

Where Somnus waited for him.

"Ah," Ardyn said. He squinted at the silver crown at Somnus' brow. "I see."

"It's for the best," Somnus said. He waved a hand, and a small, fist-sized stone appeared, glowing over the black ring on his right index finger. "Even if the stone can heal you, you were never fit to be king. Your place is with the people, Ardyn. Out there, in the fields, healing their hurts, stemming the tide of the Scourge. Let others take the burden of rule from your shoulders."

"Such an honor," Ardyn said, climbing up the stairs to the throne. The stone sank to meet him, but the darkness that simmered in his heart seemed to dampen it's glow, beatings at the light. "I must find a way to properly express my gratitude."

His fingers brushed the surface of the stone, and Ardyn was thrown back, tumbling down the stairs. He rose with a snarl, and Shiva wrapped her arms around his, holding him still.

"The corruption has spread too far," she said, as Ardyn thrashed against her hold. "The stone is not strong enough."

"No," Ardyn hissed. "No, Shiva, you promised. You _swore--_ "

Shiva lay a hand over Ardyn's brow, but he couldn't feel it at all. "I know," she whispered. "But sometimes, even the gods themselves are not enough."

 

\---

 

In time, Ardyn forgot the shape of his brother's face. He lost the taste of wine, the bitter chill of winter winds slicing through his coat, the heat of the Disc. Touch disappeared into memory, followed by pain, by smell, by the sound of Gilgamesh's voice. Ardyn changed his clothes, his voice, learned how to pretend to register the touch of a hand on his shoulder, and emerged some three hundred years before the birth of King Regis to present himself before the reigning Empress of Niflheim. And there he stayed, while in Lucis the Crystal grew, sapping the kings of their magic and lives to maintain a wall, to fuel their city, to do anything but it's true purpose of healing and renewal. With every crown passed from parent to daughter to child to son again, Ardyn's name, his true name, was whispered in the dark. They knew, all of them, that their throne was built by a usurper, and they fed the wall with all the desperation of criminals hiding away in a cave, refusing to emerge into the light.

 

Noct held his forehead with both hands, staring blankly at the wall of his bedroom.

"There's no way," he said. "There's no way that you're. You can't be. You're my _dad._ "

"Yes, well." Ardyn shrugged. "It's possible to be a father _and_ the founder king of Lucis, you know."

"Ohh, my gods," Noct moaned. "Give me a minute to process this. A year. Ten years. How am I even alive? Is it _possible_ for you to--"

"You are what I'd call a happy accident," Ardyn said. "I admit that I... wasn't quite sure how to behave around you, at first. I imagine there were times that I was rather cold, or seemed unfeeling..."

Noct stared at his father. He thought of the handwritten notes in _The Long Game,_ detailing bits and pieces of a life that didn't quite fit the modern day. References to Gilgamesh. Somnus. The way Ardyn knew all the words to the songs in Old Solheim, the ones that history professors and professional linguists couldn't translate. The haphazard collection of antiques in Ardyn's room, the way he used to wait too long to buy Noct winter coats, how he always turned up his collar or pretended to shake only after Noct started shivering. That time an MT actually got a hit in, and Ardyn didn't even bleed.

"So you're a king," Noct said his hands slipped over his eyes. "My dad's a king."

"And so will you be, Noct," Ardyn said. "The first true king of light to be born in two thousand years. It's why Lucis wants you so badly. They need to feed the Crystal, but King Regis grows weak, and his heir is dead. You alone have the magic needed to keep the wall going, and they will do anything, even invoke your, hah, ancient heritage, to see it done."

Noct peeked out through his fingers. "The Insomnian Problem just got a hell of a lot more complicated. Can the Crystal heal you yet? That's still why we're doing this, right?"

"Oh, to an extent," Ardyn said. He pulled Noct's hands down. "But the truth is, Noct, I believe that it's time the usurpers stepped down, don't you?" He pushed a knuckle to Noct's jaw, tilting his head to the side, and smiled. "When we go to retrieve the Crystal, Noct, I hope that, as my sword, you can undertake the most important task of your career."

Noct looked to his father, and found a cold, dark rage there, burning beneath the surface of his calm, golden eyes. "I know," he said. "I know what you want."

"You'll have to tell me," Ardyn said. Noct licked his lips, fighting his rolling stomach, and met his father's gaze. 

"You want me to kill the king."


	14. Chapter 14

The first thing Noct had to do, before he could see his father safely to the throne of Lucis, was to end the war.

Not immediately, of course. It was like a bride price, Ardyn told him. In the years after the fall of Solheim, when lines of inheritance meant something, suitors would present potential partners with goats, chocobos, and deeds to their family lands. No one came into love empty-handed, and there was no gift Lucis would want more than an end to war with the empire.

Which was why Noct found himself sitting down to a formal dinner with the emperor for the first time in his life, dressed in a new suit that felt stiff and constricting compared to his usual black fatigues. His cast was a heavy lump on his side, and he had to work to eat one-handed--Every once in a while, Ardyn casually held the plate still so Noct could use his knife.

Ravus was there as well. They still had him working directly under General Glauca, which would have been more of a punishment, Noct supposed, if Glauca weren't always away on assignment. Noct could feel the heat of Ravus' gaze on him, even when Ravus was examining a glass or speaking to a member of the emperor's high command. He wanted to pull him aside like they used to, before everything changed between them, and whisper in his ear like the friends they never were. _So it turns out I'm something of a prince, too._ But Ravus stayed where he was, and so did Noct, picking at his food while muffled conversation wove around the clink of glasses and scrape of knives.

"Noctis."

Ardyn's voice was loud enough to cut a swathe of silence in the dining hall, and Noct straightened his shoulders. 

"Yes, sir," he said.

Ardyn smiled, leaning towards him on one elbow. The eyes of every guest, every general and chief and commander, watched the pair of them like daemons tracking the sun. "I'm going to point to a number of men at this table. I want you to remember their faces."

Noct glanced at each face in turn as Ardyn, in the stark, outraged silence, pointed out six people seated at the table. Ravus was not one of them. When Ardyn was done, he turned back to the general at his right. 

"Pheasant tastes a little over-seasoned, does it not?" he asked.

"The hell was that for?" The Imperial High Commander, one of the men listed, threw down his napkin. "Gods, Chancellor, I will not sit idly by while you..."

"It's only a lesson in politics," Ardyn said, flashing a wide smile. The emperor scowled.

"Izunia. I will speak with you privately when this is done," he said. Ardyn nodded deeply.

"Of course."

Noct noticed, as the dinner continued, that none of the men listed bothered to touch the pheasant on their plates after that. He caught Ravus' eye at last, and returned his curious, slightly worried look with a cool, blank expression. Ravus frowned and turned aside.

That night, the first man Ardyn pointed to, a chief with strong ties to the empire's largest weapon's manufacturer, was found dead in his study. Noct hardly made it out the door the next morning before the high commander had him by the throat, pushing him up against the wall.

"What does he want?" he snarled. Noct raised himself on his toes, waiting for the commander to stop puffing and glaring, and was shoved a few inches higher. "Tell me what he wants, damn you!"

Noct tapped the man's arm, and was dropped unceremoniously to the ground. "Thank you," he said, "but I'm afraid you'll have to ask him yourself."

The commander looked like he wanted to throttle Noct where he stood, but he just rocked back, splotches of red forming on his cheeks, and stormed off down the hall.

Ardyn came back from the next council meeting practically beaming. "Excellent work, Noct," he said, dropping a bag of takeout on the desk. "Give it a few more years, and the empire will be dying for a peace accord. Ah, and you won't be eating in the mess hall anymore. It seems someone has bribed the staff to tamper with our food."

"Do you know who?" Noct asked. Ardyn raised an eyebrow, and he sighed. "You know, not everything has to be a test."

"Yes, but then you'd succumb to boredom and run off to be a painter somewhere, and I'd be down one son." Ardyn threw himself onto his bed and opened a book while Noct tore into the takeout, already planning their next move.

Noct didn't get out to Lucis much after that. When he did go, he was under watch, and had to keep changing his path to avoid traps and ambushes every dozen meters. A few of the tombs had been raided before he got there,and Noct found toys left in place of the weapons, little figurines of bears and cats and foxes. He even found a phone, which rang when he turned it on. He promptly threw it against the wall of the tomb, letting it shatter on the stone.

He kept the figurines, though. They sat on the desk in his bedroom in a neat little line, and he looked them over while he lay in bed, running his fingers over spots of paint that had worn thin. He dreamed of them, of a small blue fox chirping in the underbrush, flashes of a bushy tail, footsteps at his back.

Sometimes he dreamed of a mountain in the sea.

Sometimes he dreamed of hallways. Endless hallways, sometimes of marble, sometimes of steel, sometimes made out of roots and branches and withering leaves, spiraling higher and higher. Ardyn ran ahead of him in those dreams, a young boy with a nose too big for his face and shaggy red hair, stopping every few paces to beckon Noct forward. His eyes were always closed, though, and when he spoke, it was in the voice of the woman Noct had seen at the first tomb, all those years ago.

"Little king," said not-Ardyn, his shadow long in an unfamiliar hallway of grey marble. "Little king!"

Noct woke from those dreams sweaty and disoriented, and took to sleeping on the floor of his father's room again, just as he used to. It was easier, then, to shake off the unsettling feeling that he'd been spirited away in the night, climbing an endless slope with a child who wore his father's face. Ardyn said nothing when Noct rolled out a camping pallet on the rug and took up residence, and Noct's own bedroom remained still and empty, a museum to Noct's childhood. 

When Noct turned nineteen, Ardyn took him out to a field behind Gralea and drew lines in the snow. It took him two days to complete them while Noct practiced drills and made coffee Ardyn couldn't taste. Noct's head swam with the names of every diplomat in Lucis, drawn up in a binder Ardyn had given him to study. Their efforts in Gralea had whittled away at the emperor's resources, cutting off funding to research and development, sending Besithia out to the wilds in disgrace, and building up a small network of generals who, while not exactly loyal to Ardyn, were fearful enough to obey. The same tactics couldn't be used in Lucis--They needed a lighter touch. Killing the king was violence enough.

"Here we are," Ardyn said at last, and Noct stepped into the first square of lines, gaze raking over the arrows Ardyn had scratched out in the snow. "I had to shrink it to scale, but it's enough. Welcome to the Citadel, Noct."

Noct carefully walked through a loose map of the first floor of the Citadel in Insomnia. There were the service entrances, the garages, the elevators. There were hidden stairs and galleries and a residential section Noct took care to memorize. He walked through all of them, careful not to disrupt Ardyn's work, and stopped at a spot marked with a deep circle in the snow.

"The king's private office," Ardyn said. He took Noct's shoulder. "This is where you'll be, Noct, when my plans finally take hold."

Noct took a breath. "I hope it's enough," he said. Ardyn's hand tightened, and he turned to him. "Dad. Maybe we should just go for the crystal. We can heal you. You can--"

"We need the ring first," Ardyn said, and Noct sighed. 

"I just..." Noct ran a hand through his long hair. "Were you always alone? You know... Before you met my mom?"

Ardyn raised his eyebrows. He never spoke of Noct's mother. He rarely spoke of his past at all after that first confession, but Noct couldn't get the thought of him out of his mind, of Ardyn walking through the world alone, his family dying of old age while he remained frozen in time, not quite human, not quite a daemon.

"I met your mother when she was about your age," Ardyn said. He raised a hand, and the snow beside them stirred. An image took form at their side, a woman with short black hair and Noct's eyes, her skin several shades darker than his own. She smiled, and Noct felt something in his stomach twist. "She was a noblewoman from Insomnia, and it was the night of her engagement. We shared a drink, and when I toasted her health in Old Solheim, she said..."

"Try that on another girl," said the illusion, in clumsy Solheim. Noct stepped towards her, and she raised a hand to his face. Her hand passed through him, but Noct stayed still, trying to pretend that her fingers were warm.

"She looks familiar," he said.

"Of course," Ardyn said, and the illusion broke apart, leaving Noct with nothing but an endless stretch of snow and ice. "She looks like you." 

Before Noct could speak, Ardyn whipped out a blindfold from his armiger and twitched his fingers. Noct closed his eyes, and felt the dampness of his lashes cling to the fabric as Ardyn tied the blindfold tight.

"Now," Ardyn said. "I want you to walk back to the throne room. You have two minutes to get it right."

 

\---

 

The morning that Ardyn's ship was due to take off from a secure site just outside of Gralea, Noct stood in front of the mirror and scowled. The Glaives all knew his face, that much was certain, and no amount of makeup could fully hide the signs of Noct's training. The scar on his neck was too dark for concealer, so Noct wore a high collar with one of his father's scarves, and if he squinted, he could still see the crescent moon mark under his eye. The scrapes over his nose were too thick to hide, but the one on his brow disappeared easily enough, and if he wore gloves, no one would notice his hands. Noct was loathe to cut his hair, so he twisted it in a loose braid and fitted in a spike at the base, a warning for anyone who wanted something to grab.

Ardyn wore his most ostentatious clothes, of course. Stripes and florals and ruffles and belts, never mind what rules of fashion he was breaking, and one of what had to be at least three dozen hats, tipped jauntily over his hair. Which, Noct noted, probably hadn't been brushed. Ardyn's notion of vanity was a strange one, and Noct had given up on trying to work it out years ago.

"Ready?" Ardyn asked, when Noct joined him in the hall.

"Yes, sir." 

"Not quite," Ardyn said, and tightened Noct's scarf. Then he pulled a pair of thick glasses out of his armiger, which he fitted over Noct's nose. 

"There," he said, and tilted his head. "Now you look something like your father at your age."

Noct snorted. "You had glasses two thousand years ago?"

Ardyn only smiled. 

Noct squared his shoulders as they left their rooms at Gralea behind. He couldn't say he liked Gralea, not compared to his home before, but it was a wrench to take down all his pictures, the few flowers that survived, and the pressed sylleblossom from Ravus. Noct had one of the figurines from the tombs in his right pocket, the small fox statue, and rubbed the nub of its ruby horn as he and Ardyn passed through the halls of the keep. When they stepped out into the street beyond the wide gates, a cold wind beat at Noct's back. The rumble of traffic disappeared in the whistle and moan of the wind, and for a moment, Noct thought he heard something else there, something almost human. He gripped the fox in his fist, took position at his father's heels, and refused to look back.


	15. Chapter 15

Noctis Lucis Caelum was asleep, sprawled out on the couch in the back of Ardyn’s private airship, when they finally crossed international borders. His left foot flopped off the edge of the cushions, and his lips were parted slightly, head tipped back over the arm of the couch. He always slept that way--limp, like a ragdoll cast to the floor by a bored toddler--even when he was eight and still unused to his new bed at the garrison. 

Ardyn hadn’t planned to keep him this long. It had been a whim, at first. Confuse the boy, maybe plant a tracker on him, and send him back with a seed of the Scourge growing in his heart. But then, well. The boy had been so _receptive,_ hadn’t he? So eager to please. And then there was all that business with wanting to be Ardyn’s Sword, and one thing led to another... 

He’d given Lucis plenty of opportunities to take Noctis back. They knew where he was likely to be. They knew his skillset. They even knew what he looked like. But Noct was just too… too powerful, perhaps. Too raw. They came expecting a prince, and what they got was _Noct._

He should have been born at the founding of Lucis, said a small voice in the back of Ardyn’s mind. He should have been raised in the fields, with olive groves bordering the mountains that no longer split the sky, with goddesses who kept their promises, with a festival held every time the Scourge receded to allow one more star to hold back the dark. 

“Ah, well,” Ardyn said. “We make do with what we have.”

“Huh?” Noct sat up, blinking blearily up at Ardyn. “What’s that?”

“Nothing, Noct,” Ardyn said, and smiled. “It’s nearly time.”

 

\---

 

They went their separate ways when they reached the wall. A Glaive held a piece of the wall open for them--He nodded to Ardyn and called him _sir,_ and looked at Noct like Noct was a delicate bomb on the move--and Noct hitched a ride in a taxi, using a blue card that Ardyn said carried just enough Insomnian credits to get him to the Citadel. 

The taxi driver glanced back at Noct in the rearview mirror. He had thick black hair and an easy grin, but Noct barely noticed. “This’ll get you about five blocks to the Citadel,” he said, tapping the card. “You okay with that?”

“Guess I’ll have to be,” Noct said. The driver looked at him again. Around them, the farms that bordered the edge of Insomnia gave way to residential buildings, painted fanciful colors against the thick green foliage bursting from their lawns. Noct watched them go by with his heart in his mouth, running the fox figurine over and over in his hands. 

“You from Tenebrae?” the driver asked. Noct shrugged. “Got a cousin who went to Tenebrae. Said it’s all empire now that what’s his name, the prince. You know.”

“Ravus,” Noct said. 

“Yeah, Prince Ravus. Ever since he joined up with the empire, it’s all gone to hell. Is it true he burned down the royal forest?”

“No,” Noct said. He rolled down the window, trying to get a better look at the skyscrapers rising in the distance. It felt… strange… to see it up close. Like hearing a word said aloud when he’d only ever read it before. “No, he didn’t.”

“My cousin says…”

Noct tuned the driver out as they turned down the main road. That feeling in his chest was building, and despite years of training, his hands just couldn’t stay still. He kept fiddling with his pockets, with the fox, with his hair--Once, he almost summoned a knife. Only the driver's incessant chatter reminded him that he wasn't alone, but still Noct felt detached, like he was tethered to his body by a fraying string. He shuddered and slipped the fox back in his pocket. 

“There we are,” the driver said, slowing down at last. “The Citadel. Nice, yeah?”

Noct ducked down to look through the windshield. Two spires, with a violet light shooting up from the center, surrounded by a stone wall fitted with enormous statues. They weren’t close enough to feel the crackle of magic in the air, but Noct’s skin prickled in anticipation. He could almost taste it. It always took visitors by surprise, he remembered, when they stood under the light of the crystal and... When they…

“Hey.” The driver squinted at him. “You okay, man?”

Noct blinked. “Yes,” he said. “Sorry. Thank you.”

“Yeah, no problem.” 

Noct slid out of the taxi and shook out his arms. Above him was the statue of the Fierce, carved in exquisite detail, but someone had tagged their name on the bottom of the statue, and bits of it had been chipped off over time. Noct had to walk under two massive stone feet just to get to the sidewalk leading through the old wall. 

One thing Ardyn hadn’t warned Noct about, when he briefed him on Insomnia, was the sheer amount of people. Noct hadn’t been in a crowd of more than twenty since he’d snuck into the festival at Lestallum, and that was _years_ ago. No one looked him in the eye, at least, but he kept bumping his shoulders into people and missing the crosswalk by inches, and his breath was starting to come short, his heart beating loud in his ears. 

Somewhere in the distance, a dog was barking. Noct jumped at a high, plaintive whine, and turned to find a young man about his age holding onto a leash with all his strength while the dog at the other end tried to drag them both in Noct’s direction. The dog was white, with a green cloth wrapped around one paw, and Noct couldn’t help but smile and turn to greet her. 

“Hey, girl,” he said, and held out a hand. The dog pranced in place and dragged her owner another step. 

“Sorry,” her owner said. He was a blond man with the faint suggestion of muscles outlining his large frame, and his face was a mass of freckles. He pushed up thick glasses with one hand before staggering forward. “Tiny doesn’t always get like this around people, I swear.”

“That’s okay,” Noct said. He crouched down on his ankles, and the dog immediately lunged, trying to lick his face. He held her back by scratching the side of her neck and ears. “Oh, she’s a good girl.”

“The best,” said her owner. He looked Noct over carefully. “But she’s… kind of a one-man, one-woman dog…”

“Maybe she knows I always wanted one,” Noct said. “Dad never let me… Oh, shit. Shit, I have to go.” He pulled away, and both the owner and dog looked momentarily thrown, twin expressions of dismay on their faces. Noct grinned to himself and jogged towards the Citadel again, wiping his hands on his pants. 

He knew the moment he entered the magical field surrounding the Citadel. It was like his _skin_ was electrified, buzzing with energy as he jogged around the wide plaza in front of the main entrance. It should have been painful, but it was almost pleasant, really. Like dipping into a hot bath after running around in the snow all day. Noct idly scratched at his arm and ducked into the service entrance door, which was propped open with a plastic crate.

There were three cameras on the service stairway. Noct warped into their blind spots, one by one, and held his breath when he reached the top of the first flight. No alarms. No sound of Kingsglaive soldiers pounding down the stairs. He wrapped his fingers around the door handle and eased it open.

_On the one hundredth floor of the Citadel, Ardyn Izunia opened the doors to the throne room._

_“Your majesty!” he cried, as a dozen soldiers started forward. He bowed low, sweeping off his hat, and smiled up at King Regis. The king was half-risen from his chair, a hand on his cane, staring down at Ardyn with the same disdainful glower that once belonged to Somnus. Perhaps, Ardyn supposed, as his boots clicked in the silence, it ran in the family._

_“Chancellor,” King Regis said. “How did you make it through th--”_

_“Now, now,” Ardyn said. “No need to keep up the pretense, Regis. I can call you Regis, can't I? This is, after all, a family matter.” He flashed his teeth, and Regis drew up to his full height. “You should call me by my name.”_

Under the desk would be best. Noct ran through his options as he ducked through the corridors, slipping into empty rooms as staff in royal black came by. If he waited there, the king would be too off his guard to summon the magic of his ring. Or he could wait behind the door and wrap a wire around his neck. 

No. Noct grimaced. Too painful. A good slash at shoulder-height would do just as well, even if it _would_ cause a mess. But at least it would be swift. The king may have been the descendant of the usurper, but he deserved that much, at least.

_”It seems you’ve misplaced something,” Ardyn said, and laughed as half a dozen swords sprouted from the air around Regis, sharp blades flashing in Ardyn’s direction._

_Regis took a step, and the swords moved with him, forming an arc around his head. A bloody crown, Ardyn thought, and laughed again._

_“What,” Regis said, in a voice like thunder, “do you know of my son?”_

It was the painting that stopped him. Noct knew he was in full view of a security camera, but when he caught a glimpse of the canvas on his right, he found himself slowing to a crawl. He halted before a painting taller than himself, a portrait of a woman with Noct’s hair and eyes, her skin a light red-brown, her smile coy. She wore moonstones at her neck, and her shoulders were draped in black silk.

Noct had seen her before.

He’d seen her in the snow in Gralea, an illusion flickering in the wind. And before. He’d seen her… before. Somewhere cool and dark and well-furnished, with his father holding him up on a knee, speaking in his ear.

Noct raised a hand to the frame.

“Mom?” he whispered.

_”What do I know?” Ardyn asked. “What a loaded question. His favorite color is blue. He’s quite fond of coeurls. You can't get him to eat carrots for love nor money--he says they taste metallic, though gods alone know if that's true--and he’s, oh. About seventy floors below us, give or take a few.”_

_Regis stiffened, and Ardyn took a step back. He drew his magic close, purple clouds of it swirling at his feet, and just as it rose to consume him, he set his hat back over his brow and winked._

_“Wouldn't you like to say hello?”_


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a panic attack/disassociation in this chapter.

A faint chime rang through the air as Noct touched the frame of his mother’s portrait, and Noct jumped back as though struck. A warm, light voice came through the speakers, sounding young and somewhat amused.

"Good afternoon," they said. "There is a sale happening in the public gallery on all prints of the royal family. Citadel staff get fifty percent off for the next two hours. I repeat, there is a sale..."

Noct lay a hand on the wall, trying to steady his breathing, and looked back into the eyes of the woman smiling out of the portrait. The moonstones around her neck were set in a ring of diamonds, which Noct vaguely remembered from the charts and lists Ardyn had him memorize. They were important, somehow, those jewels. The style was too distinctive to forget.

He scanned the wall. There were other portraits there, some draped with a tasteful curtain, some small as his hand, some brown and faded with time. Noct walked along them, peering into their faces, until he found the same jewels on another woman's neck, a woman with wild grey hair and a sharp smile, her hand raised in a fist. _The Rogue,_ said the plaque under the frame. One of the queens of Lucis, the _first_ queen of Lucis. Noct looked back at the smiling portrait that had stopped him in his tracks, and found the small plaque just to the side of it, half hidden by a curtain. He came close enough to smell the oil of the paint, and gently lifted a tassel. 

_Queen Aulea Lucis Caelum._

Queen? Noct drew back, suppressing an incomprehensible desire to cast a wall between himself and the painting. His father had said that his mother was a noble, but a _Queen?_ Did she marry after she met Ardyn? And if she had, then why was Noct with _him?_ Why hadn’t he stayed? Was it because she… Did she marry the king?

No. No, it was something else. Noct could feel it like a hand pushing at his eyes from the inside out, a muffled pressure in his brain, a panic rising like a pocket of heat in the chill winds of Gralea. There was something missing.

The creak of a door opening threw Noct out of his thoughts, and he turned from his mother’s face, jogging for the hall where King Regis’ office had been marked on Ardyn’s map. He had to ask Ardyn, that was all. He’d ask him later, when this was done, and maybe the pressure in his head would stop, and the uneasy thrill in his stomach would die down, and he could take the portrait to his room back in Gralea and--

No, he wasn’t going back to Gralea. 

_Gods,_ he wanted to go back. He wanted to talk to Ravus. He wanted to talk to his _mother,_ that ghost in the snow, ask her all the questions that had gone unspoken throughout his life, all the words Ardyn didn’t seem to understand or hear, all the gaps in his own history that nothing seemed to fill. He wanted to know what she sounded like. If she really smiled like that. Why she hadn’t gone back with Ardyn. Why she was _here,_ wearing the royal jewels on her neck like they belonged there...

The door to King Regis’ office had a simple coded lock, nothing like the ones Ardyn had set Noct to cracking back in Niflheim. It took a minute to figure it out based on the grease stains his fingers had left behind, and when the door swung open, Noct stepped inside with the air of a man headed for the gallows. 

It was a small office. Bookshelves lined the walls, with square gaps at irregular intervals that held pictures and antiques, and there was a large oak desk at the end of the room with a well-worn chair and a lamp shaped like a lump of crystal jutting out of a stone. Noct stopped at the window--Double plated glass, probably bulletproof--and picked up a soft, battered-looking stuffed coeurl. A child’s toy, he thought, turning it over. Obviously well-loved. One of Regis’? 

He wished, as he set it down, that he hadn’t thought of that.

He slid his fingers over the desktop as he passed it. It was so much smaller than he remembered. When he was little, he used to hide in the cupboards in the front, giggling while his father stalked around it. _Where’s my boy?_ He’d cry, in a loud, booming voice. Noct would stifle a laugh, kicking his feet against the desk, while his father opened glass cabinets and picked up books. _Where has my Noctis gone?_

But... Surely that happened in the old keep. Maybe every official had a desk like that, maybe Ardyn got one just like the king’s to spite him. Maybe. Maybe.

There were grooves in the desk where someone had propped up their feet too many times to count, and Noct ran a thumb over them as he examined the king’s workspace. There were maps piled in the corner, but otherwise, it was relatively bare. Just a few pictures propped up on silver frames, winking and shifting as Noct moved. He looked down at one and realized that it was a screen, frozen on a blurry image of someone’s legs. He tapped it with a finger.

“Oh, Regis, you’ll break something.”

The voice that came from the screen was a woman’s, half choked with laughter, and the camera rose to the face of a young man with dark brown hair and a trim beard, who was carrying a small child on his shoulders. The child laughed and clung to his hair, and the man went galloping down a dark, well-furnished living room. The camera followed him, and there she was, sitting on a couch with her hands over her eyes, the same woman in the portrait.

“There is no Regis,” the young man said. “The man you love is gone. I’m a chocobo today.”

The child squealed, and the woman slid her hands down her face, looking to the camera.

“Cor,” she said, with a fond, tearful expression. “Turn that fool thing off and stop him before he runs Noctis into the wall.”

The screen froze on her face, and Noct hunched over it, no longer aware of the open door, and tapped the screen again.

“Oh, Regis, you’ll break something.”

She moved so fluidly. Fingertips brushing her hair--So soft, so fine, so like the hair of the child on the young man’s shoulders. Noct touched his own hair, fingers curling. Her eyes weren't blue, but they had the same shape, those eyes that always set Noct apart in Niflheim, the eyes that peered out from the child’s face. She sat with perfect posture, but her feet swung just above the floor, and she was beautiful. Achingly beautiful.

“You’ll break something.”

Ardyn never kept pictures of Noct or his mother lying around. Maybe he forgot to. Maybe there wasn't a point, not when Noct slept on the floor next to his bed half the time. 

But you'd expect, Noct thought, as he paused the screen on the young man racing through the room, that someone who forgot his own mother’s face would want to remember his son’s.

“Oh, Regis.”

Noct drew a ragged breath. 

And another.

_O_

_h_

_R e_

_g_

_i s_

_We’r e_

_un  
a r m e d_

Noct looked up. “What?” 

His voice, when it came, wasn't his own; It was that of a child. A child he knew. A child on the dirt in the light of a burning hunk of metal and oil, a child with blood running into his mouth and eyes, a child who looks up at the man standing where his father should be a child who can't feel his legs who can't feel his can’t

Books crashed to the floor, thumping on Noct’s shoulders as he pushed himself back, retreating from the man in a black and silver Crownsguard uniform who appeared at the door.

“Noctis,” the man said. His hands were raised, palms out. “My name is Cor Leonis, Marshal of the Crownsguard. I am unarmed. I will remain unarmed.”

“Cor,” said Noct’s body. Noct himself was somewhere else, in the bruises forming where the books struck him, in his clenched fists, in the tablet where his mother smiled at the camera.

“That's right.” Cor took a step, and the spines of King Regis’ books dug into Noct’s back. “Cor Leonis. You know I’m honorable. Or I try to be.”

Noct nodded shortly. Cor the Immortal almost always took prisoners alive. 

“I know you try to be, as well,” Cor said. Noct let out a sound that could have been a laugh, and Cor’s bland expression twisted, just for a second. “Let's talk, alright? The two of us.”

“I don't want to talk,” Noct said. He wanted to scream. Maybe he already did, and Cor was too polite to comment. He couldn't gauge how loudly he was talking, the tone of his voice, the speed of his movement. His breath was painfully loud. He couldn't remember the last time he blinked.

“You're looking rough around the edges, little man,” Cor said, and when Noct sucked in another breath, it came in broken.

“Cor.” That voice was strange. Familiar, in the way dreams were familiar, like the fox in Noct’s pocket or the feel of the desk, the prickle of magic under his skin. “Cor, is he--”

“Kind of a delicate situation, Sir,” Cor said, out of the corner of his mouth. “Going to suggest you listen to Clarus for once and--”

At that moment, as Cor edged to the side, a hand reaching for the handle, a ghost passed through the open door.

He was a stranger, silver-haired and wan with exhaustion, but when he looked at Noct, Noct felt the wind go out of him like a blow to the stomach. There, hidden in the shadowed eyes of the king of Lucis, was the man Noct had searched for all those years ago, limping at Ardyn’s heels. There was the tilt to the brow that Ardyn couldn't quite emulate, the mouth that shaped a weak, uncertain smile Ardyn never gave, the bearded jawline that was so much softer without stubble. There was the man on the screen, the one who held a child with Noct’s face, the one who smiled at Noct’s mother like grinning wasn't enough, the man who opened the cupboard doors when Noct thought he’d finally given in, and shouted, _Found you!_ in a voice filled with unabashed delight.

“Wait,” Noct said. “Wait. Stop.”

“Noctis,” said the king.

The king. The _king._ Noct was supposed to… Ardyn was counting on him to…

Noct swallowed around the taste of copper in his mouth. An Izunia always stayed the course. Izunias didn't let emotion rule them. Didn't back down. Didn't run. But Ardyn wasn't an Izunia. Not really.

And neither was Noctis.

“Noct,” Regis said, and he pushed past Cor, his cane thumping on the rug. He was so close. Too close. He stopped before Noct and crouched down, and it wasn't until that second that Noct realized he was sitting, hunched in a pile of fallen books. Regis lifted a hand, and Noct flinched.

“I surrender,” Noct gasped, and he pushed back his hair from where it had fallen loose over his brow, digging at the roots. Regis rocked back, face tight with pain, and Noct closed his eyes. “I surrender.”


	17. Chapter 17

Cor Leonis could never be entirely sure where Regis Lucis Caelum got a reputation for being level-headed.

The first time he met Regis, Cor was thirteen, the youngest Crownsguard in known history and far too short for his new uniform, and Regis had looked him up and down, brimming with the arrogance of a prince on the cusp of his power.

"You're my father's man?" he'd asked, and Cor bristled, preparing himself for yet another inquiry, another request for his test results, another round of incredulous looks and condescending laughter. Or worse, for him to bring up the other thing, the name Cor had to sign on his entrance papers, the one he'd spent weeks convincing the recruiting office to bury. But Regis just smiled, his eyes tight with an emotion Cor had only seen in the slums where he lived, the kind of look that cleared out bars and made people cross to the other side of the street.

"Sure am," Cor said, and Regis grinned.

"Not for long."

That was true enough. Cor was swept into Regis' world like detritus in the path of an oncoming cyclone, and despite his vows to King Mors, despite the badge on his chest and promises made in the shadow of the throne, he was Regis' man within the year. 

Regis was everything a prince should have been. Refined. Clever. Proud. But Cor learned, while driving him around in a new car with dents on the hood and cracks in the windshield, that Regis would never be the king his father was. Regis loved his friends with a fervor that was almost overwhelming, a love so fierce that even Cor was dizzied by it. It was love that brought Regis before the commander of his father's army, that made him beat his knuckles bloody on the men who thought the punk kid in a Crownsguard uniform needed to be taken down a peg, that had him smiling behind a busted lip when Cor finally snapped, insisting he could fight his own battles for fucking once. 

It was love that made Clarus have to drag Regis off the battlefield when the shit hit the fan in Accordo. Love that sent Regis into fits of tragic despair, writing poetry to Aulea's lips while his friends groaned and Aulea sent him pitying looks over her shoulder. Love that brought him a hair's breadth from exile, the wall be damned, when he ran off and eloped with Aulea the day after he came back from Accordo. Love that led to him wrecking his car, _Cor's_ car, only for him to stagger the next three blocks to the hospital so he could hold Noctis in his arms. 

Love was Regis' ruin. 

There was work to be done, Cor knew. The Citadel was still on lockdown. Clarus had his hands full trying to juggle the Crownsguard _and_ the Glaive, since Drautos was off on leave, and there was still a man in the Citadel, the man who had laughed at Regis, who disappeared in a whirl of smoke like a magician at a bar. Cor would deal with that in his own time, though. For now, Regis was threatening to tear holes in his suit trousers while Noctis sat in a small room with a cup of water and a tablet, looking like one of the shell-shocked refugees who came trickling in from the borders, hollow-eyed and tight-lipped.

Cor sat down on the other side of the table.

"Noctis," he said. "I need to confirm that you know you aren't a prisoner."

"Should be," Noct said. He said it softly, matter-of-fact. His voice had a lilting accent, too close to that of the man who'd disappeared in the throne room. "Unless you're in the business of letting murderers go free."

"We're a little more lenient on child soldiers," Cor said, and when Noct looked at him, it was his father's anger that Cor saw there. "That's what you were."

"I wasn't a child," Noct said. "I was old enough to know."

Cor leaned forward on his elbows. He was aware of Regis watching them through the door, and tried to push that awareness back, lowering his voice. "I was thirteen when I joined the Crownsguard," he said. Noct sat up slightly. "Killed a man trying to assassinate King Mors when I was twelve, and I was put on the accelerated program to the Crownsguard, you could say. First skirmish was at thirteen. Nearly lost a leg before my fourteenth birthday, fighting... Someone I shouldn't."

Noct slid a hand over the tabletop. "I was twelve," he said. Cor only just stopped himself from clenching his jaw.

"They should've made me wait," Cor said instead. "I should've been on probation until I was old enough to handle it. If anyone's ever old enough. When I was about your age, your mother--" Noct flinched, only slightly, and Cor glanced away. "Aulea pulled me aside and asked if I had any friends outside the military. If I had any hobbies. Spoke to anyone about the nightmares, or the panic off the battlefield."

Noct was watching Cor carefully, examining him like a strange new creature in the wilds.

"When you're isolated, it's easy to justify that what you've gone through is normal. Maybe even that you deserve it."

"I asked for it," Noct said. He pushed the tablet away. "I wanted it. I told Dad..." He stopped and ran a hand through his hair, which was falling out of its messy braid in long, silken lumps. 

"How many friends do you have, Noctis?" Cor asked. 

Noct was silent, staring down at the tablet. Cor reached over and turned it back on. 

"We'll start here," Cor said, and tapped on the screen. The video that played was of himself just twelve years before, holding a young Prince Noctis upside down by the ankles. The boy in the video laughed until he started to cough, and Cor swept him up in his arms.

"Catch!" Cor called, and Noct squeaked as he was flung through the air. The camera followed him just in time to show Clarus Amicitia swinging him around, Noct's arms wrapped tight around his bicep. 

"That's Clarus," Cor said. "Father of Gladio, one of your old friends."

"I've seen Gladio," Noct said, and Cor grimaced. 

"The other one's your godfather," Cor said, and Noct blinked up at him. "And that's not a title I can give up. I can retire any time. The role of Marshal can go on to someone else, and I won't bat an eye. But I'll always be your godfather. And I know you don't believe it yet, but Noct?" He lay a hand on the table, just a few inches from Noct's. "It's good to have you back."

Noct said nothing, but just for a second, his hand shifted closer, his fingertips just brushing Cor's. 

"Wish I could remember you," Noct said, and Cor took a risk, sliding his palm over Noct's hand. 

"Maybe you will," Cor said, and Noct pulled away, sitting back in his chair. "Just give it time."

 

\---

 

Down in the main plaza of the Citadel, where office workers streamed out of the main doors like the staggered burst of water before a breaking dam, Prompto Argentum peered up at the flickering light of the wall.

"Sorry, sir," a guard was saying. "The Citadel's on lockdown. Can't say more than that."

Prompto adjusted his glasses. It was an unseasonably warm day, and the walk from his small loft apartment had been full of sudden turns and winding streets, Pryna leading the way with her ears pressed flat to her skull. If Prompto hadn't known her better, he almost would have said she was _scared,_ but then they'd run into that man on the main street, the one with the drawn, tight expression and the bearing of a soldier, who turned Pryna into the kind of gamboling, bushy-tailed puppy that inspired her nickname in the first place. When Pryna came back to Prompto, feet tapping the pavement in an impatient dance, Prompto had bent over her and dug his hands in the soft fur off her mane.

 _My boy!_ she'd cried. She didn't use words, exactly, but nine years of sharing her with Prompto's unorthodox best friend had taught him a thing or two. Pryna didn't speak in words. She didn't have to. She spoke in _feeling,_ and Prompto almost reeled with the overwhelming joy that fell from Pryna like the sun.

_My boy!_

So far as he knew, only Prompto and his best friend's brother belonged to that exclusive club, so he didn't protest when Pryna pulled him after the man, shoving through the crowd without so much as a backwards glance. They trotted up to the gates behind the old wall, where Pryna tapped her paws while Prompto fished in his jacket for his work pass--Civilian Contractor for the Crownsguard, A3--and flashed it at the bored, yawning guard. People were used to seeing Prompto and Pryna heading through the gates, even if they didn't really know what they were there for.

But somewhere between the gate and the front doors, everything changed. The people who trailed out of the doors were all wearing the same style of uniform, and they didn't exactly keep their voices down as they passed.

"Like a fire drill," one of them said.

"Intruders?" whispered another.

"Not like that," someone else said. "I heard there's a Nif in the throne room."

Prompto raised his brows, and the guard in front of him groaned.

No one exited through the gates, though. They all lined up in the plaza, Crownsguard soldiers barking orders and walking along the rows, and Prompto pointed to them, then to himself. The guard shrugged.

"Fuck if I know," he said.

"Look," Prompto said, keeping a tight grip on Pryna's leash. "I'm here on official business." Probably, he thought, as Pryna tried to surge between his legs. 

"Sorry," the guard said. "I have my orders."

Prompto sighed and looked down at the dog, who was shoving her nose in the guard's knee. "Alright. Whatever you say."

"Tha--" the guard started, then froze as the world fell away, collapsing into the dim, faded haze of one of Pryna's visions.

There was a boy standing in a garden, carrying a fat cat in both arms. A boy in a bed filled with stars, a man sitting next to him, beckoning to Pryna. _It looks like Queen Sylva has sent us a visitor._ Fire. Darkness. A woman with a round face and silvery blonde hair speaking urgently. _There's a shadow in my visions, Umbra, Pryna. You must watch over the boy. The shadow is darkest over his fate._ A boy's legs flashing behind a rusted fence. Pryna's paws digging at earth around a post, widening the gap, trying to wriggle through. A cat slipping in ahead of her, purring while the boy scratched her ears. _Hey, I love you, too._ The boy sitting in the dark, older now, holding a sword on his legs. Pryna's first young charge behind her, stumbling in his pajamas, bleary-eyed and squinting. _What is it, girl?_ Running through the woods with Umbra, watchful and frantic, blood in the earth at their paws. And at last, at last, the boy kneeling before her, hands on her fur, the boy Pryna and Umbra and Gentiana had been following long after the voice that gave the order failed to speak. Her boy. Her _boy._

The vision faded, and Prompto staggered, taking off his fogged glasses. The guard was shaking, too overwhelmed by the force of Pryna's vision to do anything else.

"Sorry," Prompto said, as he shoved past him. "It's always like that at first."

He made it to the second floor before he was stopped by another guard, who'd worked at the Citadel long enough to dance out of Pryna's way. When Prompto asked for Cor Leonis or Clarus Amicitia, the two men whose names usually made most guards drop all inconvenient questions and wave him on, the guard just shook his head and whispered into the radio.

A few minutes later, Prompto was holding Pryna back with both arms as Ignis Scientia and Gladiolus Amicitia rounded the corner, their faces unnaturally pale. Even Gladio looked ashen, and when they came close, the guard stepped back, giving them room.

"Prompto," Ignis said, unbuttoning the collar of his shirt. He was sweating, beads of it crawling down his neck. "I'm afraid this is a bad time for a message from the Oracle."

"I don't have one," Prompto said. "It's Tin--Pryna. She's looking for someone here, this guy with an ugly scarf and long black hair, kind of skinny..." He trailed off as Gladio and Ignis' faces fell. "Guys?"

"It's..." Ignis glanced at Gladio. "Prompto, I think you mean--"

"It's Noct," Gladio said, and Pryna whined in Prompto's arms, wriggling with impatience. "My dad just told us. Prince Noctis is back."

Pryna huffed, and Prompto was knocked to his back by a gut-punch of a vision--fire licking across the main plaza, a man in a horned crown, his skin crackling with the Scourge--while Pryna went racing off down the hall, fluffy tail whipping furiously in the air. Prompto rolled to his hands and knees, and Ignis hurried to help him up, wrapping an arm under his elbow. By the time he was on his feet again, Pryna was just an echo of excitable barking in the stairwell, and Prompto was still blinking flashes of magical fire out of his eyes.

"I don't think Pryna cares about lockdown," Prompto said, and Gladio took his other arm.

"Half our guards are Kingsglaive right now," Gladio said, dragging both Prompto and Ignis back down the hall. "I don't think they'll recognize the Oracle's pet, Prompto."

"Shit," Prompto said, and the three of them took off running, following Pryna's path of destruction past a dazed guard and up a set of winding stairs. Prompto tried to think over the hammering of his heart as he hauled himself up the steps. Prince Noctis was in the Citadel. Prince Noctis, the guy Ignis and Gladio always spoke of in hushed whispers, the lost son whose absence lay in every hesitant word and uneasy silence. Pryna's boy. Prompto imagined him as he was on the street, withdrawn and wiry with muscle, standing tall in the throne room with a cloak over his shoulders and a glittering crown on his brow, delicate and deadly as lightning.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaa so! An absolutely fantastic artist on Twitter known as @planetoftheKyk drew the scene where Ardyn comes back to the Citadel to find Somnus on the throne! It's absolutely lovely, and I'm so flattered! Go check it out! [Right here!](https://mobile.twitter.com/PlanetoftheKyk/status/1031035268499947520)

When Noctis Lucis Caelum was born, everyone who knew him said that he looked the most like his maternal grandfather. Noct was only two when Regis commissioned a portrait done of Noct's cheek being shoved up against his grandfather's, who swore to Aulea when she was crowned that he would have an official portrait done when the astrals themselves woke just to drag him there. It was the happiest Regis had seen him in years, and he barely let Noctis out of his arms all day. 

"You don't want this royal nonsense," he said, holding Noct over his head. "Leave that for Aulea's second child. I'll make a point to love them less."

"Father!" Aulea had cried, and he laughed, tossing Noct into the air.

Some seventeen years later, as Regis sat in an unused spare room of the residential wing, it was hard to see the same small child who had laughed in his grandfather's arms. His cheeks weren't as round, of course, and his hair was long, tied in a sloppy braid at his back. It brought out his cheekbones and jawline, and when he'd risked a glance at Regis, it was almost as though Aulea were looking out through his eyes. But she'd never looked at Regis with fear, not even at the end, when she lay in a van halfway to Tenebrae with her voice a rasp and the Scourge eating at her skin, reminding Regis to call Noct for his bedtime story as though she weren't falling to pieces under Regis' eyes.

Regis wondered what Aulea would think if she knew he'd failed her so thoroughly.

Shock had run its course through everyone, it seemed. Cor was leaning against the empty wardrobe, head nodding, Clarus was shouting out orders in the hallway to keep himself--and the Crownsguard--alert, and Regis himself felt like climbing into a warm bath and never coming out. Noct was flagging by the time he left the office with Cor, and collapsed on the bed the moment his knees made contact with the mattress.

"It doesn't matter what you do," he'd said, in that faint, vaguely Tenebraean accent. "Just don't wake me when you do it."

Regis' hand hovered over Noct's messy hair, then drew back. Noct shifted in his sleep, strands of black hair falling in his mouth.

"Hey," Cor said, softly. "Hey, Reg."

Regis drew in a shaky breath. “As though the Accursed needed to give me another reason to want him dead,” he said. “He knew that Noctis’ time with us was short, and still he took him from me.” 

“There's still time,” Cor said. 

“Time enough?” Regis asked. Cor opened his mouth, but whatever fool thing he planned on saying in an attempt at comfort was lost by a scratching at the door. Regis rose, but Cor reached the door first, pulling it open just enough for a white muzzle to push through the gap.

“Pryna?” Cor asked, and the dog shoved the door open the rest of the way, bounding for the bed. Regis moved to intercept her, but she leapt onto the mattress, where she wriggled and crawled her way next to Noct. She lay her head on his chest, and Noct’s breath hitched, just for a moment, before he sank in the pillows, eyelashes twitching. 

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Leonis,” whispered someone from the door. It had to be Pryna’s handler, the boy who had shown up at the Citadel nearly a decade before with a puppy and a letter, claiming he had _important information from Luna._ Despite himself, Regis smiled. He left Cor to deal with the nineteen-year-old in the hallway, and sat on the bed next to Noctis.

“Let her stay, Cor,” Regis said, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I can only hope that you know what you're doing,” he said to the dog, who sighed deeply. Regis knew the Oracle’s messengers from his own childhood, when he had to stand to attention and bow to them while his father stood by, watching his every move with disapproval. They were kind creatures, in Regis’ experience. Single-minded in their devotion, perhaps, but then, all dogs were. 

He stroked the dog’s soft, pale fur and watched his son shift in his sleep, drifting deeper still into the uncertain realm of dreams.

 

\---

 

In Noct’s dream, he walked up a low slope, passing through tall pines that groaned in a high wind. Pine needles softened his footfalls, and a hush lay over the woods, like the silence in a tomb or a shrine. Noct tucked his hands in his pockets and emerged into the light, where a shadow ran ragged over the soft grass of the hill.

A boy sat on the crest of the hill, overlooking a wide stretch of grassy valleys tucked into the foothills like folds in a thick blanket. Autumn made the grasses brittle, the trees were tinged with gold, and a herd of sheep wheeled in the wake of three sleek black dogs far below. The boy watched them, his fingers digging into the grass, and tilted his face up to the sun. 

“Ardyn,” Noct said. He looked just as he had in Noct’s mazelike dreams back in Gralea, with thick red hair and an open, guileless expression. He hummed to himself as Noct climbed the hill, the tuneless and meandering melody of a child, and when Noct reached him, he made no sign of recognition. 

_This is the last day that Ardyn Lucis Caelum was ever truly human,_ said a voice behind them. Noct turned, and started back as a woman in black, her hair framing her face and swinging over closed eyes, alighted onto the grass. It was the same woman whose image had flickered in tombs and in half-remembered dreams, and Noct tried to reach for his armiger, scrambling for a sword. She stopped before him, smiling, and lifted a cool hand to his cheek. 

_I couldn’t touch you before,_ she said. _The Accursed’s magic grows too strong, and I am not yet awoken._

“Who are you?” Noct asked. He stepped aside, careful not to bump into the humming boy at his feet. The woman shrugged.

 _An echo,_ she said. _Perhaps a friend. I knew him, once._ She knelt gracefully next to Ardyn, tucking her feet under her like an empress at court. _None of us can go back to who we were. Even the gods. Tomorrow, Ardyn will cure his first patient of the Scourge, and he will take the disease into his own blood. It will already be too late._

“And then that’s it?” Noct asked. “You’ll just leave him? Let him suffer for thousands of years, all because he was loyal to you?”

 _All because he loved us,_ the woman--the goddess--said. _Sit, king of the stone. Sit and watch the sun go down._

“It’s sick,” Noct said. Ardyn sighed, picking up a blade of grass, and folded it carefully. “We can’t go back, so we’re doomed? If we’re broken, the gods just discard us?”

 _Yes,_ she said. _But neither of you are broken. Not here. Not now. Sit with me, my king._

“I’m not your king,” Noct said. He lowered himself to the grass all the same, and the goddess ran cold fingers over the back of his hand. 

_This is the best day he’ll ever have,_ she said. She turned to Noct, and her eyes opened, glassy and sharp as the biting wind of winter. _If he is truly to be forgotten. The gods will abandon him, all but one, and she too weak to do more than watch him fall. I wonder, will his family forget him as well? Will you?_

“He abandoned me,” Noct said.Saying it out loud was… Worse, somehow. He licked dry lips. “Used me. Took me from my… From what could have been my family.”

 _I do not ask you to forgive,_ the goddess said. Ardyn whistled high through the blade of grass, and she lay a hand on his back. _All I ask is that you remember._

Noct opened his eyes.

There was a weight on his chest, hard and heavy and strangely hot, and when Noct raised a hand to inspect it, his fingers brushed over short, coarse hair. He tried to focus, and saw the dim shape of a dog lying at his side, tail slapping the mattress.

“You have pets here,” he murmured. 

“She's more of an honored guest,” said the king. Noct started, dislodging the dog, who whined pathetically and wriggled closer. The king sat only a foot away, perched on the edge of the bed with his long legs propped up on a chair. 

Noct lifted his hand an inch, then let it fall back. Regis' hunger was a fog filling the air, pooling in the space between them, but Noct didn't know how to answer it. How much of the love he felt for Ardyn was tied up in this man, in the dim memories of a time when Noct ran down the gray stone halls of the Citadel and hid in desk cabinets? How much lay in quiet moments in the keep, with Ardyn humming an old folk song that died out centuries before, with Ardyn's hand in his hair as he slept, with his knifelike smile as Noct pulled off a successful maneuver in training? How much lay with the young man who walked into the same Citadel two thousand years before, who stole apples from a tree in a village buried under the foundations of Insomnia?

How much was true?

"Your majesty," Noct said, and gods, if Ardyn really _had_ sent Noct to kill the king, those words would have done it. 

"Regis," the king said. "It may be easier to call me Regis."

“Regis,” Noct said, trying out the word. It felt foreign on his tongue, even though he’d said it enough with Ardyn, going through their plans. Ardyn’s plans. 

_Goodness, Noct,_ Ardyn said in his mind, amused as ever. _You can't go along with one little ruse? Of course you aren't_ their _Noctis. You haven't been their Noctis since you were eight._

Not since the attack. Not since Noct woke, delirious with pain, and fumbled for answers when cold, unfeeling doctors asked for his name. He knew he’d lost something, but he didn't have the words anymore. So he wandered, seeking out the closest thing he could find. Every day that he woke up early to follow Ardyn around, every morning that he stared in the mirror, trying to piece together his father's smile, every eager attempt to please and desperate bid for attention, Noct had been seeking out Regis. And then he'd forgotten him. He'd lost him. Killed the messengers Regis sent to bring him home.

Noct closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, Regis was still there, waiting.

“I know it's a disappointment,” Noct said. He thought of Ardyn walking through the Citadel, his brother standing at the throne, and braced himself. “I’m not the person you were looking for. I don't think I can be. We… No one can go back, and I’m--he--”

Noct’s breath stuttered in his throat as Regis’ hands reached for his shoulders. He was pulled up, pressed into a tight embrace, his head resting on Regis’ shoulder. 

“Of course I was looking for you,” Regis said, his voice rumbling through Noct’s skin. “Did you think absence would make me love you less?”

Noct shuddered. The last time he’d been held like this, he was… Surely Ardyn… There was that time, when he was bleeding out after the fight with Ignis and Gladio, when he’d held him, never minding the blood on his jacket…

Noct raised his hands to Regis’ back. Regis was warm, his arms were solid around him, and Noct wondered for a brief moment if he could just stay there, sinking into his embrace. Regis’ hand went to Noct’s hair, cupping the back of his head, and Noct pressed his forehead to Regis’ shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Noct whispered. For what, he couldn't say. For not being the boy Regis wanted. For not being the Sword Ardyn deserved. For not being good enough to know the truth, for every time he drew his sword, for the man he left gasping pools of blood into the cavern floor behind a waterfall. For the boy on a hill two thousand years before, for the boy in the wreckage of a daemon attack, staring up at the man he thought was his father.

Maybe one day, he thought, as he knelt in Regis’ arms, they would all be forgiven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So one thing that stays the same in each version of this is the complicated, messy relationship between abuse and empathy. Sometimes healing means that you don't forgive someone. Forgiveness needs to happen on your terms if it happens at all. 
> 
> But it's still important to forgive yourself, because breaking free of a cycle is pretty hard to do when you think you deserve it. 
> 
> Noct isn't at the point where he's thinking about things like that. There's still a lot of self-loathing, and even if he's starting to see the truth of what Ardyn's done, he's still going to struggle with it.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter goes at a saunter more than a run. Things will pick up, but I'm giving Noct the chance to get acquainted with the Citadel first. There's some serious fluff on the horizon, by the by.

Ardyn Izunia, formerly known as Ardyn Lucis Caelum, chancellor of Niflheim and sometime chosen king, moved into his new quarters in Gralea with little fanfare. His old suite was emptied, the small bed in the drab, windowless closet of a spare room was wheeled out for use in a dorm, and he settled down in his new office with a cup of tea he couldn't taste and a book he didn't much care for, waiting for the emperor to catch on.

It was midday in Gralea--Just about dawn in Lucis, by his count--and soon, there would be work to do. But for now, Ardyn sat alone in his chair and skimmed through his book, thumbing past dog-eared pages and lingering where the spine creaked and groaned.

The radio on his end table screeched with static, and Ardyn closed his book with a snap. There was a squeal of feedback, a series of small sharp clicks, and through it all, the faint, almost indiscernible sound of a man's voice.

"Dad?"

Ardyn slowly set the book down on the desk. 

More static. "--can't--reas--ck up, _Dad--_ "

Ardyn stood.

"Ardyn." The voice was clearer, the static fading to a dull roar in the background. "Gods, how long did you--"

Ardyn picked up the radio, hefting it in his palm, and tossed it into his armiger. He looked out at his room, taking in the unused bed, the single desk, the small collection of pressed flowers given to him by a boy who stopped everything at the sight of a cat and laughed when Ardyn mimicked the members of the Niflheim council. 

Then he turned on his heel, leaving the room behind, and strode off to poison the emperor.

 

\---

 

It was a mistake. Noct knew it as soon as he slunk into the bathroom, clutching his radio with both hands and holding it to the narrow window by the shower. Finding the right frequency was difficult enough without a city's worth of radio interference, but he knew that he might as well have set off a beacon for all the good his so-called secure line did. 

Still, he had to know. Ardyn couldn't have planned to leave him there, not without _some_ kind of motive. And there was a part of Noct--A larger part than he cared to admit--that hoped Ardyn would have the answers.

Part of him just wanted to hear Ardyn's voice.

When the radio went dead, Noct stared at it for a minute, tucked in his hands like a baby bird, and threw it at the tub with enough force to dash it to pieces. Bits of it went skittering over the tile, and Noct kicked it into a corner, never minding who might come across it later on. He threw the door open and shoved his way past a stone-faced guard, who already had a hand to his earpiece. Of course. The dog was nowhere to be found, but the door was open, which must have explained it. At least _someone_ got to go where they wanted in that place.

Noct made for the door leading to the hall, and was surprised to find it barred by a man wearing the black and silver uniform of the Kingsglaive. Noct hesitated a moment, trying to suppress the urge to call on his armiger, and the Glaive turned to face him.

The man had the look of someone from the archipelago, from the braids in his dark hair to the small tattoos that some of the more traditional Galahdian citizens commissioned when they came of age. There was a book back home filled with poorly-drawn charts and explanations for each design, all written by some guy from Niflheim who was more interested in the resources of Galahd than the people who lived there. Ardyn said the book was probably garbage, but it was the only book on Galahd that hadn’t been banned or lost in the war, so Noct had pored through it all the same. Still, he hadn't just seen those tattoos in a book. He frowned, rocking back on his heels, and felt a memory pull itself loose, the feeling of a hood over his hair, the dream of a mountain in the sea.

"Nyx," he said. The man's lips twitched. "You're Nyx. From the festival."

"And you're the kid who wanted to be an artist," Nyx said. Noct felt heat rise to his cheeks.

"I'm not--I didn't say I--" Noct sighed. "That's what stood out? Really?"

Nyx shrugged. "I can add a shit sense of self-preservation if you want. You'd better stick around. Whatever you did, it was enough to get Clarus Amicitia out of bed."

"Clarus--the Shield?" Noct recalled the video Cor had played for him, and the tall, broad-shouldered man who'd swung a young Prince Noctis on his arm. Still, he doubted the man tasked with guarding the king would look kindly on anyone who just tried to call the Nifs, no matter what they used to be to each other. Noct pushed past Nyx, who stood aside to let him through, and strode off towards the end of the hall. There had to be a stairwell somewhere. An elevator shaft. A breakable window.

“We’re still on lockdown, you know,” Nyx said behind him. Noct nearly jumped out of his skin. Nyx was on his heels, thumbs hooked in his pockets, looking at Noct sidelong. Further down the hall, the other guard was speaking into his headset. 

“Where are you trying to go?” Nyx asked. “Back to Niflheim?”

“No.” Noct tried to ignore the heat of Nyx’s eyes on his neck.”I don't know. Why are you still following me?”

“I’m on duty,” Nyx said. Noct looked back at the other guard, then at Nyx. “Not my fault that I’m better at it than he is. The door’s locked,” he added, when Noct tried to wrench open the door to the stairwell. “We haven't finished clearing out the upper floors yet.”

“And they’ll let me go free when they do?” Noct asked. Nyx looked at him sharply. Noct realized, then, why he didn’t feel that same uncomfortable twist to his gut that arose every time he spoke to Regis or Cor. There wasn’t any pain or pity in Nyx’s expression. Whatever he felt was pushed down far enough that it wouldn’t show on his face when he spoke. It was the same face Noct had to wear in Gralea, the one that revealed nothing that could be used as leverage, the one people like Ravus never really learned to perfect. Something about that chilled him, seeing it in Nyx’s face. Where did he learn that skill? Surely not in the Citadel, where everyone seemed to wear their pain like a banner.

“Do you want an honest answer?” Nyx asked. 

“Noctis.” That was Cor, opening a door with a handprint lock at the far end of the hall. He was wearing what looked like soft, faded fatigues under a rumpled Crownsguard jacket, which hung unbuttoned off his shoulders. His cheeks were rough with stubble, and when he came closer, Noct could see shadows under his eyes that hadn’t been there the day before. 

“Guess that’s it,” Noct muttered, and withdrew his hand from the door. 

Clarus Amicitia found them fifteen minutes later in the spare bedroom, Noct and Cor sitting awkwardly on opposite ends of a coffee table stacked with light, golden-brown pastries and crystal breakfast trays. Nyx turned into a polite, featureless statue, and seemed to fade into the background, stationed in silence at the door. Noct only ate when Cor did--He didn’t know the kitchen staff, not like in Gralea--but Clarus made a beeline for the pastries as soon as he entered, stuffing half of a chocolate croissant in his mouth without so much as a _good morning._

He didn’t look much like the man Noct had seen in the video. He had the same face, Noct supposed, but without his long brown hair, his jawline was more prominent, and he’d somehow managed to fill out his shoulders even more than seemed physically possible. He was a wall of a man, a weapon with a diplomat’s face, and Noct wondered, idly, if something of the Sword of Old Solheim had been passed on to the Lucian Shields. 

“So,” Clarus said. When he sat, his chair let out a groan of wood and straining leather. “You tried to contact Niflheim this morning.”

Noct took another bite of his pastry. It was richer than he was used to, sweet and light with hints of cherry--the mess hall in Gralea didn't go for much beyond function, and since Ardyn didn't _have_ to eat, dessert for breakfast wasn't really high on his list of priorities. He wondered how long it had taken for Ardyn to lose his sense of taste.

Clarus waited.

“You don't need me to confirm it,” Noct said at last.

“No, but I’d like to know why.” Clarus shifted--Noct looked him over, examining him the way he did the members of the emperor’s council. He was uncomfortable, that much was clear. “You called him your father.”

Noct forced himself to remain still. “Two days ago, he was. Now I’m a prince. My mom’s portrait is bigger than I am, and I’ve been killing off my… The king’s soldiers since I was twelve.” He glanced at Nyx, but Nyx didn't even blink. “So maybe you get why I needed answers.”

“You'll get them,” Clarus said, and Noct slowly drew himself upright, shoulders straightening out of his slouch. “But we’ll need answers, as well. We don't want to reopen any wounds--”

“He didn't _hurt_ me.” The words pushed out of him with more vehemence than he intended, and too late, Noct caught himself digging his nails into the arm of the chair. He could feel the weight of their stares, quietly examining the scars that stood out against his skin, his unkempt hair, his lean frame. Noct tried not to think about the hours in the training yards, when Ardyn came at him with a merciless, emotionless gaze, when his sword nicked his skin and Noct had to wash around the bruises the next morning, the scrape of a washcloth almost too rough against his skin. “It wasn't like that. I’m not about to, to break down, or explode. You don't have to act like I will. I’m an--”

Izunia. Izunia’s didn't humiliate themselves with outbreaks of emotion. They didn't let enemies trap them with a few careful words and a tray of pastries. They didn't need to beg over the radio to know what they had to do. They didn't.

“Where's the king?” he asked, before the others could take advantage of his lapse of control. 

“He may be indisposed for the morning,” Cor said. “But when he’s done, he’ll want to hear your story. So will I. And Clarus, if you’ll let him.”

Noct ran a hand through his hair. 

“The more we know, the more we can help,” Clarus said. “And the less you'll need to go to your kidnapper for answers.”

Cor looked at Clarus sharply, but Clarus kept his eyes on Noct, as though daring him to protest.

“I won't do it again,” Noct said. “If that's what you mean.”

Clarus’ mouth twisted. “No, but it's a start.”

There was a soft, almost unnoticeable sound at the door, and all three of them looked at Nyx, who stared woodenly at the wall. “Permission to speak,” he said. Clarus nodded. “If the lower levels are cleared, I’d like to request opening the tenth floor gallery. For the morning, before his majesty returns from Council.”

Cor huffed softly. “I could go with them,” he said to Clarus. “If you need to return to Regis.”

“What's the gallery for?” Noct asked. Nyx’s mask slipped a bit, revealing a wicked gleam in his eye.

“It's where the art lives,” he said.

Noct groaned. “Really? I say one thing when I’m fifteen. One thing.”

“There's an original Apollo down there.”

“The hell is an Apollo?”

Nyx smiled. “Wouldn't you want to know?”

Clarus rose, prompting another chorus of groans from his chair. “I don't see why we can't open the doors, if you don't object to it,” he said at last, in a voice that suggested the opposite.

Which was how Noct ended up standing next to Nyx in a long, narrow hallway filled with statues and paintings, the scent of oil and pastels thick in the air, staring dubiously at a canvas painted to look like a woman standing in a field of sunflowers. 

“I don't get it,” he said, after a while. Nyx gave him a curious look. “Is this supposed to jog my memory or something?”

“What? No. Half of these are new.” Nyx stood next to one of the plush benches in the middle of the hallway, looking at the paintings with a dispassionate air. “Thought you needed something different.”

“Why?” The woman in the painting had feathers sprouting out of her back, long and grey and almost hidden by the stalks of the sunflowers. “You're a Glaive. I… You know what I am.”

“I think so,” Nyx said. “Don't think you do, if you're talking like that. I haven't forgotten the kid I saw at the festival. Looked half starved, and lonely, and maybe a little frightened.”

“I--”

“Haven't forgotten the kid Pelna talked about either,” Nyx said, and Noct froze, no longer registering the subtle brush strokes that made up the field of flowers. “He said it was an accident. Said the kid was terrified. Said it wasn't his fault.”

Noct swallowed thickly. “Did he.” His throat worked again. “Did he make it?” He examined Nyx’s face, and cursed softly. “I know it means nothing now, but I… I tried to... He asked me to wait for the others, but I couldn't… I’m sorry.”

“That's not the kind of thing a monster would say,” Nyx said. “I just wish we could've brought you home then.”

“It was probably already too late,” Noct said. 

“No, it isn't.” Noct blinked, thrown off to find Nyx’s mask gone, his gaze no longer restrained and polite but honest and clear, looking right through him into his twisted, roiling core. “Kid, I'm from Galahd. My town was leveled twenty years ago, but everyone still talks about going home one day. Even me. We don't give up on anything.”

“So I’m a leveled town,” Noct said, dryly.

“Sure,” Nyx said. “If you want. But clear away enough rubble, and the foundation’s still there.” He walked off, slowly making his way to the next painting. “You’ll see.”


	20. Chapter 20

Noct came back from the gallery in a daze, his mind whirling with color and shade. He kept to the back, almost bumping heels with Nyx, and barely noticed when Cor took a sharp turn off the elevator through a wide hall he hadn't seen before. There were more guards, including one or two who broke protocol to stare at Noct, and Cor opened a door emblazoned with a skull and flower motif, waiting for Noct to pass. Noct stopped short at the sight of a small, ornate living room, complete with a low table stacked with sandwiches and a higher, narrower one where King Regis was setting up a checkered stone board.

"Noctis," he said, and his eyes crinkled in a fond smile. Noct flushed and glanced back. Nyx was standing guard at the closed door with another Glaive, a woman with dark hair that spilled out of a messy bun at the back of her head, and Cor and Clarus were settling down on a small couch, their phones out.

"Have you ever played chess before?" Regis asked. He was placing tiny glass figures on the board. "I thought we might have a match."

"I don't know," Noct said, but he sat down anyways. "It looks familiar. Kind of like a game I used to play when I was a kid."

"Ah, good." Regis sat, and Noct took note of the cane leaning against the back of his chair, silver-tipped and strangely industrial. Regis pointed out the different figures on the board, listing each of their moves and purposes, and gestured to Noct. "You first."

Noct carefully moved a pawn. _click-click._ Regis moved another on the other end of the board.

"Did Ardyn teach you anything like this?" Regis asked. Noct moved a rook, and Regis took one of his pawns. Noct scowled and freed his priest.

"Sort of. I guess. There was a game on tactics we used to play, using old maps and crosses."

"What else did you do together?" _click-click._ Shield to priest. Regis took Noct's piece off the board.

"Everything." Noct ran his fingers over a Shield figurine. "I was on watch when he went to Council. I carried his stuff. Ran messages. We trained together, ate together... read books. He taught me Old Solheim."

"Oh?" Regis smiled, and spoke in what had to be the worst accent Noct had heard in years. "How fluent are you?"

"More than you are," Noct said in the same language. He switched back. "Your tones are all wrong."

"Well, no one can say what tones were actually used."

"Ardyn knew." Noct took Regis' priest. _click-click._

"Did you speak to anyone else?" Regis asked. "Or just Ardyn?"

"Not... Not really," Noct said. He took a breath. "There was Ravus."

Noct lost two matches while he explained, in a halting, uncertain way, what Ravus had been to him. He started it backwards; _Ravus and I don't speak anymore. We don't speak anymore because he tried to abduct me. He tried to abduct me because I killed someone. I killed someone because..._

He won a match. The board was abandoned for cold sandwiches and jasmine tea, the tea and trays cleared off while Cor, Clarus, and Regis pulled out a deck of cards, fussing over who got to deal. Noct learned the rules of Kings Knight between scattered questions about his life, his training, how he learned to drive. He won a handful of coins from Clarus in three rounds, and told them about Aranea. About the cave. Pelna. The people who stared at him in the halls of the imperial keep.

"He even dressed me in black," Noct said. "He wanted people to know. The emperor knows, I'm sure. A lot of it makes sense now." He paused a moment, staring down at his cards. "The emperor won't be happy if this gets out. He'll want me killed, probably. Or he'll try and strike Insomnia again. If people find out I've been in Imperial hands, this could turn some of the colonies against him."

"We considered the possibility," Clarus said. "The Citadel will remain on lockdown until we have word of what they're planning."

"I'd be more worried about Duscae and Leide," Noct said. "Or Altissia. They're Empire, but they favor Lucis. The emperor might want to make an example."

"If he attacks Altissia, then he truly is a madman," Regis said.

"That's what they used to say about Galahd," Noct said, and took another card. "Wait. What does it mean if I have four behemoths?"

"Fuck," Cor said, and threw down his cards. Clarus groaned and set his next to his drink, and Regis shuffled his together and lay them neatly on the table. 

"It seems you've won," Regis said.

"You should play against my son sometime," Clarus added. "He's been trying to get a fourth player for years."

"You mean Gladio," Noct said, leaning forward on his elbows. "The one who tried to cuff me."

There was an uncomfortable silence at that, but Clarus broke it, his voice low. "The boy who stowed away in a Kingsglaive van because he thought he could solve everything with a smile and a familiar face. Yes, I recall."

"I still think it was excessive to take his license away," Cor said.

"Oh, the thirteen-year-old runaway has an opinion," Clarus drawled, and Cor, to Noct's surprise, kicked the king's Shield hard in the shin.

“Regis,” Clarus said, turning his shoulder to Cor as though blocking him from the conversation with his considerable bulk. “Do you still have the note Noctis wrote when he and Ignis ran away?”

Regis sighed and stretched out his bad leg, kneading around the brace. “Perhaps,” he said. He glanced sidelong at Noctis. “ _Someone_ rather desperately wanted a kitten. I believe the exact words were, _If I don't have a cat, I’ll die._ ”

“We found you and Ignis trying to sneak out in one of your father’s cloaks,” Cor said. “You kept running into walls.”

Blue light glimmered around Regis’ hand in a fine mist as a grubby piece of paper materialized in his palm. “Let's see,” he said. “ _Dad. I am dying and it is your fault. You said Mr. Nibbles can't live in the house…_ ”

Noct propped his head on his chin as Regis continued, painting a dim picture of two young boys trying to convince a guard that they were one man in a lumpy cloak. He accepted a cup of water while Clarus told a story of a four-year-old prince who snuck carrots in his armiger, as Cor talked about Regis shoving a phone in the king’s face on the way to the hospital-- _She’s dilating, Cor!_ \--and nearly getting the both of them killed. They talked about Noct’s favorite toys, the time they found him sleeping in the library, his and Gladio’s early attempts to wield swords twice their size. They didn't assume Noct would remember, and while most of the stories felt like they belonged to someone else, Noct found himself sinking into the warmth of their voices. It sounded like a good life. Privileged, maybe, filled with the kind of luxury Noct never knew in Gralea, but good. 

The tall windows overlooking the city were tinged with the burnished gold of the sunset by the time Clarus groaned, gripped his knees with both hands, and eased himself to his feet. The chair creaked as it settled back in place, and Cor stood with considerably less fuss, holding himself steady despite the brandy glass he’d left on the table.

“Come on, old man,” he said. “We have work to do. By your leave, your majesty,” he added, and bowed to Regis, who gave him a distant smile.

“Why Marshal,” he said. “You almost sound respectable.”

“Perish the thought, old friend,” Clarus said, and clapped a hand on Cor’s back. He cast Noct a tight smile, and Cor nodded, but all Noct could do was watch them go, amused by the way their heads dipped towards each other, bickering softly.

Regis sighed and reached for his cane, and Noct sat up without thinking, holding out his arm. Regis laid a hand over his and shakily rose--Noct could feel the tremor in his leg so acutely that his own twinged in sympathy.

“A war wound?” Noct asked. 

“It’s always worse when the weather turns,” Regis said. “It's no matter. How would you like to see the sunset through the wall? There's a balcony just beyond this room.”

Noct shrugged, but he was loath to remove his arm from Regis’ grip. They walked together to the windows, which had a latch in the middle that swung them inward, scraping across the carpet. A pair of comfortable lounge chairs sat on a narrow balcony, overlooking the last strip of crowded, impossibly high buildings between the Citadel and the sea. The wall of Insomnia was a shimmering veil, turning the red-gold of the sunset into a dazzling prism, and Noct held onto the balcony railing with both hands, watching sparks skitter across the sky.

“It's like looking through the Disc,” Noct said, as Regis lowered himself into a chair. “Almost, anyways.”

“It's been a while since I had the honor to see the Disc in person,” Regis said. “I’ll have to take your word for it.”

Noct leaned on his arms. “I like this view better, anyways. Not as many gnats. Or voretooth. Or daemons.”

Silence fell. The sun slowly sank into the sea, turning the sky purple and grey. 

“Noctis,” Regis said. Noct looked over. Regis was watching him carefully, like Noct were a faun about to bolt in the street. 

“You weren't exactly given a choice in this,” Regis said. He turned to the sea, his eyes narrowed in the last light of the sun. “What would you do, then, if you had the freedom to choose?”

Noct let out a long breath. “I don't know. I think I’d want to stay. If he wants me here, I have to know why. And I want to… fill in the gaps. Figure out what's true.” He looked down at his hands. “Maybe go and see what a movie’s like. Eat at a restaurant. Go to a library.” Learn something about Ardyn, perhaps.

When he looked back at the king, Noct was surprised to find Regis staring fixedly at the horizon, his brows knit tight. His face softened somewhat when he looked at Noct, but the anger was plain in the way he pushed his fingers together, in the dark gleam of his eye. Somewhere behind his calm, quiet mask, there was a fury nearly as dark and deep as Ardyn’s, a biting loss that clawed its way through him, unstoppable as the Scourge. It made sense; His son had been returned to him, but changed. Wounded, maybe, in a way Noct couldn't really quantify from the inside. Crawling with scars. Cut loose from a single-minded purpose and cast adrift in a sea of only half-familiar faces.

“There’s something else,” Noct said, and Regis blinked slowly. Noct sat down sideways on the other chair, facing Regis, and clasped his hands together. “How much can you tell me about Mom?”

Regis lowered his hands to his lap. “You always did ask about her,” he said.

Noct raised a shoulder in a careless shrug. “I guess some things don't change.”

Regis sat up, the grey of twilight dulling the glitter of the wall before them, and took Noct’s hand. “I suppose they don’t.”

 

\---

 

Morning saw Noct with a new guard at his door, a larger Galahdian man with looping braids and a suspicious stare, and the discovery of actual clothes in his dresser. Noct pushed aside everything remotely black and went for a dark blue button-down and light-washed jeans. The shirt fit well enough if he rolled the sleeves to his elbows, and when he looked at himself in the mirror, it was a shock to see how much color there was in his skin, so long washed-out by the black cotton of his old wardrobe. He was darker than Regis, he realized, just a little. Closer to the tone on the portrait of his mother. 

There was a knock at the door, and the guard--Noct really did need to learn his name--opened it a crack before letting it go all the way. Noct almost laughed. The man standing at the door was the spitting image of a teenage Ignis, only lankier and dressed in a crisp shirt and slacks with grey suspenders. His hair stuck up in a fringe, and the expression on his face when he saw Noct was still that same, open look of anxiety and anticipation, rolling together in a twisted mess.

“Noct,” Ignis said.

“Ignis.” Just for the hell of it, Noct dipped his head in a slight bow. Ignis’ face flushed. Oh, yeah. Definitely the same guy.

“I heard you might.” Ignis cleared his throat. His voice was lower, now, finally leveling out from the boom and crack of his teenaged self. “They've completed the sweep of the Citadel, and his majesty informed me that you might be interested in the library. We have an archive with original texts dating from the fall of Solheim--”

“Really?” Noct grinned. “I’ve only read the one.”

“If you’d. If you'd like to, I can show you…” Ignis said weakly. Noct glanced at the guard who shrugged.

“Nothing suspicious about a bunch of old books,” he said, in a low mutter. “Or interesting, but that's my opinion.”

Noct looked back to Ignis. “Alright,” he said. “Let's do it, then.”

They headed for the elevator together, Ignis keeping a short distance at Noct’s side, until Noct couldn't take the silence anymore. He kicked Ignis softly in the heel, and Ignis gave him a startled, somewhat scandalized look.

“I heard you're the one who tried to break me out when I was a kid,” he said. “Something about a cat.”

Ignis’ lips quirked. “Mr. Nibbles,” he said. “Gods, what an ill-tempered creature. He hated everyone except you and the cook.”

“Was he grey?” Noct asked. “With one eye?”

Ignis’ uncertain smile widened. “Yes. And a nub for a tail. Leave it to Noct to remember a cat before anything else.”

“Hey, cats are nice,” Noct said. They filed into the elevator, and Ignis even leaned against the wall, watching Noctis the whole time. Not in an uncomfortable way, exactly--in a wondering way, as though he couldn't believe Noct was there. Noct flashed him a brief smile, and Ignis’ face lit up like a sunrise.

“I should warn you,” Ignis said, as the doors opened. “Gladio’s here. We know our last meeting was rather… tense…”

“Yeah. You two cuffed me, and I broke my hand,” Noct said. “I remember.” Ignis shuddered, and the guard’s eyebrows raised. Noct shrugged. “Compared to the shit that's happened in the past two days, it's nothing.”

Ignis’ lips thinned. “It's hard to forget,” he said. “But Gladio’s been at the bit wanting to see you, and since he practically lives at the library when he isn't training…”

They opened a set of wide doors, and into a room the likes of which Noct had never seen before.

Sure, there were books. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them, all curving up the rounded walls, with smooth walkways and sturdy ladders at regular intervals. There were even lifts, presumably for wheelchair users to reach the higher shelves, if the bars on the lifts were any indication, and nooks with chairs and end tables every dozen yards. On the ground floor were tables, some under glass, some out in the open, and a row of beaten-up machines. One side of the room opened up into another area, where there were more books and metal cupboards in long steel rows, which were automated to contract and expand at need. Noct stopped in the center of it all, his heart beating fast, and almost didn't hear the cry of alarm from the upper levels.

“Iggy?”

He glanced up. Gladio had grown since they last saw each other, broad in the shoulders like his father and impossibly tall, and he climbed down a lift in order to drop to the ground floor with a rattling thump. A woman who was handling a large book with white gloves at a table looked up sternly, and Gladio grimaced. “Sorry, Mom.”

Noct turned to the woman. She had dark hair pinned tight in a bun, with wisps of it curling at her forehead and ears, and she had red-brown skin and golden eyes, which flicked from Gladio to Noct’s group. She gave them all a slight, somewhat distracted smile and gestured to the book.

“Prince Noctis. Ignis. I’d say hello, but we just received what may be King Pol’s journal, and if I stop now…”

Finally, Noct thought. Someone who didn't look at him like he was a rare and dangerous breed of coeurl. “King Pol of Solheim?” Noct asked. “The one with two Shields?”

“No,” Gladio’s mother said. “I’m of the opinion that his Shield was transgender, but historians can be pretentious, myopic little… King Pol only describes her as a woman. He crossed out all the incorrect pronouns he used before her transition.”

“Really?” Noct said, breaking free of Ignis and the guard to look. Gladio gestured widely at Ignis out of the corner of his eye, and Ignis shrugged back. Noct stood next to Gladio’s mother, who had a sheaf of notes next to her, filled with scrawled translations from Old Solheim.

“More priests are falling for the cult of the Infernian,” Noct read aloud. “What's the cult of the Infernian?”

Gladio’s mother looked up at him in surprise. “That was practically flawless,” she said. “Scholars argue that he means to say _inferno,_ or _hell…_ ”

“They didn't believe in hell,” Noct said. “Anyways, if you look at the accent over the third character there--”

“Oh my gods,” he heard Gladio whisper. “He’s one of them.” Noct gave Gladio a curious look, and Gladio grinned. “A nerd.”

“Pot, kettle, baby,” his mother said. She looked Noctis up and down. “You settling in alright?” Noct shrugged helplessly. “Mm. Well. If you want to come down and see me, I work from nine to five. I could use a young man with a sharp mind.”

“Mom!”

“I’m Rose,” his mother said. “We’ll meet officially later. Go on and talk to my son before he self-combusts.”

Noct left her there, gazing down at the book with her gloved hands hovering over the pages, and returned a little sheepishly to Gladio, Ignis, and the guard.

“Sorry,” he said, and held out a hand. Gladio took it. “You think you guys have anything else from Solheim? From right after the fall?”

Gladio nodded. “Original language or translations?”

“Original, if possible.” 

Gladio waved them on, and the guard sighed loudly, following at their heels. Gladio kept up a running commentary as they wound up the stacks, talking about the places they should go after lockdown, the best spots to work out in the Citadel, the garden on the roof. 

“If you want, we can rope Prompto in and get a game of King’s Knight going,” Gladio said. “Prompto’s the guy who owns the dog that dive-bombed you the other day.”

“Shit,” Noct said. “You were there for that?”

Ignis shook his head. “Don't worry about that, Noct. It was a shock for everyone.”

“At least you weren't crying,” Gladio said gruffly, pulling down a thick leather book. Noct blinked.

“Wait, you were?”

Gladio didn't meet his eyes. “Fuck, Noct, it's been over a decade. And I’m your Shield.”

“That's still a thing?” Noct asked. He took the offered book. “I mean, yeah, I’m here, but I’m not really a…” He frowned. “A prince.”

There was a short moment of silence.

“I don't care what you are,” Gladio said at last, and pulled out another book. “I’m still your Shield. If you want one.”

“And a friend,” Ignis added. “What he means is a friend. Gladio shares his mother’s tendency to skew his priorities.”

“No, I get it,” Noct said. In many ways, he’d been the same to Ardyn. A Sword first, then a son. Maybe not even that, in the end. “You'll have to give me a minute to get used to the idea, though. I’m still figuring out the easy stuff. You know. Like who I am.”

“Right,” Gladio said. He thumped another book on Noct’s pile, gave him a lopsided, almost childish grin, and crossed his arms. “Then let's get started with a game of King’s Knight. Libertus, you up?”

The guard covered his face with a hand. “Gods. Fine. Why not. Not like I haven't lost all my funds to an Amicitia before.”

“He gave it back,” Ignis pointed out, and Gladio pulled out an end-table win a groan of wood on tile. Noct set the books down on a chair, and Gladio whipped out a packet of creased cards, smiling like a fox. “Eventually.”


	21. Chapter 21

The next day, while Regis was mired in meetings with his council, Cor Leonis taught Noct how to fish.

"Technically, it's Captain Drautos who taught you in the first place," he said, skimming a line across the manmade pond in the Citadel gardens. His Crownsguard jacket lay over a dry fountain shaped like a nymph, and his boots were unlaced, scraping across the dock as he tried to get comfortable. "He was a fisherman back in Galahd, if you can believe it. Ask him sometime, if you have a few hours to spare."

"I don't think I've met Drautos yet," Noct said. His book--A fanciful retelling of the founder king's rise, which mixed bits of Somnus and Ardyn's lives into one chaotic whole--lay open at his side, but he hadn't turned the page in at least an hour. "He's captain of the Crownsguard, right?"

"Kingsglaive," Cor said. Noct frowned. "Hey, not like that. He knew you when you were a kid--He's been your defense at more than one council meeting."

"I needed defending?"

Cor reeled in the line. "Watch how I slacken the line first before I cast, Noct. And yes, you did. Half the council didn't think you existed, or they thought you were some new Nif weapon. An unbeatable MT."

"Drautos didn't, though," Noct said. Cor offered him the rod, and Noct took it with exceeding care, jerking when he felt a vibration thrum along the line.

"He was the one who kept sending Glaives out to get you," Cor said. "He's been holed up in meetings ever since he was called back in, drafting up schedules. That's what happens when you let your sergeants ignore their paperwork. Otherwise, I bet he'd be pretty interested to see how his unofficial nephew's getting on."

"Is everyone like this?" Noct asked. Something twitched on the line, and he jerked the rod. It twitched again. "Is it a prerequisite for being in the Lucian military? Do you sign up, right, and under the second page you have to write down what kind of second family you want?"

"I wish," Cor said. "But I felt the same when I joined. Twelve years old, grew up on my own after my gran died when I was..." He squinted. "Don't remember. Young. I was young. And pretty much the first day I put on the uniform, your dad walks up to me and decides I'm his. Smug little son of a--"

"Shit!" The rod bent, and Noct yanked at the reel, twisting sideways into Cor as the fish on the other end of the line thrashed in the shallows. Cor laughed softly, and when he wrapped an arm around Noct to steady him, it felt natural. Right. Like it was always meant to be this way, that for one second, Noct had never left. He was the prince of Lucis, Cor's godson, nephew and friend and cousin to too many people, wrenching a fat, shimmering fish out of the water with a cry of delight.

That night, he ate dinner with Regis, who showed him clips of old family videos, some dating back to when Regis was young. Those were strangely formal, all of Regis standing to attention as his father entered the room, bowing to his mother, keeping his face blank and polite. Then there was another, shaky and grainy and stuttering with static, of a young Regis twisting around in the passenger's seat of a sleek black car.

"Trial two," he said. His tie was half undone, his hair mussed and wild, and when he jerked his head, the camera focused on two people crammed in the driver's seat. One was a young woman in a wide-brimmed hat, another a boy with Cor's scowl, both clutching the wheel with tight, clenched fingers.

"We're all going to die, Reggie," the girl said.

"Nonsense," said Regis. "I didn't give any of you permission yet."

"Clarus, stop him," Cor said, and the screen went blank. Noct looked sideways at Regis, who was covering his eyes with one hand.

"Gods," he said. "I don't know how any of us made it to our twenties."

"Luck, probably," Noct said, and Regis laughed. 

"I'd say." Regis steepled his fingers. "Did you ever hear the story of Aulea and Clarus breaking me out of military school?" Noct shook his head, and Regis grinned. "You see, my father thought I was in need of a little discipline, seeing as how I may have... Ah, tried to elope with Aulea at fifteen..."

The fourth day, Noct woke early, feeling jittery and off-balance, and did pull-ups on the bathroom door, trying to burn off some of the disquiet in his nerves. When he emerged from the shower, dressed in white and khaki, he found Nyx in his room, looking like he was trying to hide a smile. He was holding a cap in both hands, and he was out of uniform, dressed in grey pants and an olive green tank top that showed off the swell of his muscles. Noct kept his gaze fixed firmly on the cap instead.

"So," Nyx said. "Guess who's going out in disguise today?"

"What about lockdown?" Noct asked.

"Special permission," Nyx said, and tossed Noct the cap. 

It wasn't much of a disguise, really. Just thick, useless glasses and the baseball cap, with Noct's hair done up in a sloppy bun, but it did the trick well enough. Ignis and Gladio were waiting for him in the hall, along with the woman who'd stood guard with Nyx the other day, and a young teenaged girl in a school uniform.

"Behave," Gladio told her, too late.

"Prince Noctis!" She shoved herself in front of Gladio, holding out her hand. "I'm Iris Amicitia. The smart one," she added. "And the pretty one, but Gladio likes to think that's him."

"A... Pleasure," Noct said, taking her hand.

"Don't tell Dad I'm here, though," she whispered. "I kind of bribed Gladdy to get me out of class."

Noct raised an eyebrow at Gladio, who raised his hands in surrender. "Get to know her for a minute," he said, "and you'll understand."

"This outing isn't unofficial, though," Ignis added. "Just in Iris' case. The king gave his approval for this last night."

"It was Crowe's idea, actually," Nyx said, nodding to the woman. She smiled. She wore a clunky red necklace over her clothes, which were dark enough to look black without officially being the royal color of someone in service to the crown. 

"Thanks," Noct said.

"Don't mention it." Crowe slapped Nyx in the back. "He's giving me too much credit. I just said you needed to get outside more."

They piled into a small grey van parked in the back lot of the Citadel, with Iris claiming shotgun before Gladio even had a hand on the door. That put Noct crammed between Nyx and Crowe, with Gladio softly kicking the back of Iris' chair while she pulled faces at him over the armrest.

"Let's hit it, Iggy," she said.

"As you wish," Ignis answered, and she turned around to slam a finger on a button on the center console. Synthetic pop blasted through the speakers, sugary sweet and with so much bounce that Noct had to stop himself from tapping his foot in time.

"Oh," Iris sang along, while Gladio frantically rolled down the window. "I want to be, your summer girl."

"The beachest babe in a landlocked world," Nyx sang back. Both Noct and Crowe stared at him, and he shrugged. "It was my sister's favorite band. This is classic pop, Crowe."

"Oh gods," Crowe whispered.

It wasn't bad, really. Noct had never heard anything like it on the radio in Gralea, where the airwaves were government controlled and generally ran classical music between news and propaganda. He even drummed his hands to the chorus, which made Crowe snort and cover her mouth with a hand.

They stopped in a public parking lot a few minutes past the Citadel gates. The streets weren't very crowded, but it was still more than Noct was used to, and he couldn't tell most of the buildings apart. He squinted up at them for a moment, and staggered as Iris latched onto his arm.

"Come on," she said. "Don't stand around, I'm skipping school for this."

"I'm the worst older brother in the universe," Gladio muttered, and Noct grinned. Ignis was staring down at his phone, mumbling to himself, and Crowe was playfully bumping Nyx's arm with hers, even as they both scanned their surroundings.

"Here we are," Ignis said. "We're taking a left turn on Sunrise."

They walked in a loose huddle down the wide sidewalks, Gladio and Crowe in front, Ignis and Nyx in back, passing clothing stores and ice cream parlors and one strangely decorated storefront that Gladio just said was "too old for Iris," with a girl standing out front in a maid costume. It was like something out of a dream, an entire street dedicated to luxuries, and Noct found himself slowing down in front of a window selling jewelry that glittered and shone on their white display cases.

"Do you want one?" Iris asked, and Noct shrugged.

"I don't even know what they are," he said. "They all look the same."

"That's why you need something special," Iris said. "Something that pops. Like when I was learning how to fight, Dad took me to the weapon's room and had me hold everything, you know? It's a Shield thing. If nothing feels right, and you don't want to do it, you can leave and no one blames you for it. But even though nothing felt right, I knew there was _something_ out there. Like a tickle in my brain."

"Yeah?" Noct looked up at a screen advertising lipstick. "What was it?"

"These babies," Iris said, and kissed her knuckles. "I'm gonna be the best hand-to-hand fighter in the Amicitia line."

"When did you start training, anyways?" Noct asked.

"Eight," Iris said. "But you don't make the big decision until you're eighteen, so it's not like that's everything. Iggy wants me to go into designing."

"You should see some of her work," Ignis called. "It's impressive."

Iris blushed and gripped Noct's arm a little tighter. "Yeah, well..."

They stopped in front of a restaurant with a brass chocobo stamped over the door. The inside of the restaurant was cool and dark, with more brass chocobos framing the overhead lamps and glossy booth tables with red lining. They all slid into a half-circle booth, Noct in the middle, and the hostess handed out menus.

"Oh," Ignis said, sitting at Noct's right. "I nearly forgot. We need a false name for our new guest."

Noct looked up from the incomprehensible menu. "What?"

"Well, we can't use your name in public," Ignis said. "How about..."

"Dave," Crowe said. Everyone turned to her. "What? I know a Dave."

"Maybe... Not so--" Ignis began, but was interrupted by a young man in a red apron, bearing a notepad with a cheery yellow chocobo on the back.

"Good morning, and welcome to _oh my god you guys have to stop doing this._ " Noct sat up straight, blinking at the blond waiter, while Ignis smiled faintly and Gladio showed off his teeth. "Dude, I'm at work. I can't hang out when--oh." He looked at Noct, and his face turned a remarkable shade of pink. "Oh, your..."

"Dave," Crowe said. "This is Dave. Our new friend."

"That's right," Nyx said, clearly suppressing a laugh. "Dave."

"Dave, this is Prompto," Iris said. "He's like, the ambassador of Tenebrae."

Prompto blushed darker still. "Not officially," he said. "It's a long story."

"He owns Pryna," Ignis said. "The dog you met, remember?"

"Oh, sorry about that," Noct said. "I might've borrowed her for a night."

"It's cool," Prompto squeaked. He cleared his throat. "So, uh. What do you guys. Uh. Want to drink?"

"I have no idea," Noct said, staring glumly down at his menu.

"The, uh. The Altissian soda's nice," Prompto said.

It was. Noct had two servings of it before their food arrived, and Prompto kept coming over, stopping for a minute to talk quickly in hushed tones while looking over his shoulder for his manager. He was a pretty funny guy, all things considered, in a self-deprecating way, and he had the same kind of build as Libertus, a little on the bigger side but with the suggestion of muscle beneath. He even helped Noct make sense of the menu, and warned him away from the first dish he wanted, which was a burger on rye. Noct ended up with a chicken and rice bowl, which he polished off in what felt like seconds, and a slice of chocolate cake Prompto said was _on the house._

Ignis stared at the cake for a moment, then whipped out small notebook of his own. Iris and Gladio groaned.

"It isn't a new recipe if you steal it, Iggy," Iris said.

"It is if I elevate it," Ignis said. He gave Noct a searching look. "I'm something of an amateur baker in my spare time. If you'd ever like to taste test..."

"Sure," Noct said. "I don't think I've ever eaten as much as I have here, though."

"You're telling me," Crowe said. "The first time I went to a grocery store? I went straight home. Didn't even know how to deal."

"So she raided Lib's fridge for a week," Nyx said, and she nudged him in the ribs. "You'll get used to it."

Prompto hovered at the edges of their group when they left, eyeing Noct warily. "I might be coming by the Citadel soon, when I can," he said. "If you want to see Pryna..."

"Sure," Noct said. "Sounds great." Prompto's smile was an awkward, ungainly thing, but it was oddly infectious. "I'll see you there."

Their next stop was three pop songs away, in a quiet district broken up by green lawns and high trees. The building itself was discreet enough, but when the door opened, it smelled vaguely sterile, and the front entrance looked almost like the waiting lobby of a medical bay.

"Welcome to Pause for Paws," the woman at the desk said, in a droning monotone. "Sign in on the visitor's sheet."

Noct gave the others an uncertain look when it was his turn to sign, and finally went with a scribbled Dave. The woman looked them up and down.

"We're here to look at the cats," Ignis said, and Noct froze. "A surprise gift for our friend, here."

Noct slowly looked at the others, trying to keep his expression level. "You mean to say, you guys are..."

"A cat's good for keeping a routine," Gladio said. "And you always wanted one, right?"

"Yes, but."

"You don't have to decide," Iris said. "We can just cuddle them. Come on." She took Noct's hand and pulled him around the desk, Nyx following at his side. The receptionist opened a room for them, which featured a set of cages, a play area, and another woman in a blue uniform, who was putting a kitten back in their cage.

"Oh, hey there," the woman said. "Let me know if you want to take a closer look at any of them, and I'll see if I can convince them to come out."

Noct walked numbly along the cages. There were packs of kittens snuggled together in piles, fat older cats rolling on cat beds, one with a ridiculous ruff and a shredded ear... He ran his fingers softly over the bars, unsure which to choose.

 _Thump._ He stopped as a cat butted their head against his hand. She was a white cat with grey paws and enormous green eyes, and she let out a tremulous cry as she bumped into Noct's hand again.

"Uh." Noct swallowed. "I'd like to. This one."

The woman unlocked the cage, and the cat cried again, climbing out and leaping into Noct's arms. She wriggled in his grip, rolling on his shoulder and rubbing her face on his chin, letting out soft, whimpering cries. Noct tried to catch his breath as he scratched the back of her head, and turned away from the others, suddenly overwhelmed. He sucked in a shuddering gasp, and heard Nyx's voice, the shuffling of feet out the door. 

Nyx stood in front of him, a hand hovering just over Noct's shoulder, not quite touching. "Hey," he said. "It's okay."

"Oh gods," Noct whispered. He was _crying,_ heat on his cheeks, unable to stop as the cat inched up over his right shoulder and purred into his ear. Nyx finally let his hand land on Noct's arm, and Noct swayed into the touch.

"You know what got me?" Nyx said. "Junk mail. I was in the middle of the mail station in the Citadel, going through the garbage the city sends me every month, and I saw an ad for a necklace that looked kind of like my sister's. It wasn't even the same one, but next thing you know, Lib was manhandling me into a corner with a stack of napkins. I couldn't stop. It's ok. It hits all of us in different ways."

"I don't even know why, though," Noct gasped.

"Yeah, that happens, too. You'll be fine." Nyx hesitated, then pulled Noct in for a hug, careful not to disturb the cat. He lay a hand on the back of Noct's head, and Noct wept into his shoulder, uncontrolled and insensible and utterly at a loss, surrounded by people who wanted him, in a city that mourned him, with a creature in his arms who didn't even have to look at him twice before she knew that she loved him. 

When Ignis signed the adoption papers, Noct asked him to put her name down as Etro. The others looked at him askance for that, but in the years after the fall of Solheim, Etro had been remembered as the goddess of love. A goddess who loved humanity so dearly that she walked with them even in death, giving them peace in the beyond during a time when plague blotted out the stars. Maybe a little blasphemous, sure, but as Etro the cat wrapped her soft paws around his neck and rumbled into his ear, Noct figured her namesake wouldn't mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, y'all. No matter what happens, the cat is safe.


	22. Chapter 22

The Royal Theater of Insomnia was a fairytale castle of a building wedged between two skyscrapers, from the ornately carved columns at the door to the third century paintings in the lobby. Rose Amicitia, dressed in a red silk dress with a handbag heavy enough to kill a man, told Noct in a hoarse whisper that the theater used to belong to the Amicitia family.

"Can you imagine raising a child here?" she asked, as though the Citadel were remotely less ostentatious, and Noct smiled wryly.

"Maybe a little," he said. Iris, Gladio and Ignis stood a little ways off, the men dressed to the nines in black and white, Iris floating about in a featherpuff dress of eggshell blue. They'd become a fixture in the Citadel ever since Noct adopted Etro, who basked in the attention from her usual perch on Noct's shoulders. The cat was in his room now, sated with expensive pet food and a box of ignored, unloved toys, and despite the promise of a play, Noct almost wanted to be with her instead, listening to her rumbling purr in his ear.

Clarus arrived in a mountain of black, the straps of his official uniform hanging from his shoulders like the long feathers of a peacock. "Regis is in his box," he said. "I could only get away for a moment. Kids!"

Ignis, Gladio and Iris looked up instinctively, and Noct hid a smile behind his hand. They all had bags of chocolate-covered nuts, popcorn, and enough glossy prints to paper the building, and Iris gathered half of them up and shoved them at Noct.

"We got them for you," she said. "The prints were my idea. You can get the actors to sign them when the show's over, so I picked all the pretty ones."

"Tactful of you," Clarus said. Iris scrunched up her nose at him, and he offered his arm. Iris took his right arm while Rose nabbed the other, and the two of them walked Clarus back to the high velvet stairs.

"Don't mind the photographs," Ignis said, taking a spot at Noct's left. "The play is fantastic, in any case. We took Prompto a few months ago, so he could relay the story to Princess Lunafreya."

Noct narrowed his eyes. "I understood half of that."

"It's his dog," Gladio said. They ascended the stairs together, shoes crushing the velvet lining as they went. "She's not... really a dog. I mean, she is. But she isn't."

"Still not getting it."

"Do you know how the Oracles have spiritual messengers?" Ignis asked, shooting Gladio an exasperated look. Gladio shrugged an apology. "Pryna is one of them. She's the source of Lunafreya's oracular visions, and she can, ah, project what she sees between her and Prompto. It's very useful for passing along intel, which is why we call Prompto our ambassador."

"And Prompto uses the power of a god to let Lunafreya watch a play," Noct added. "Nice of him."

"We tried to use Pryna to get to you," Gladio said, and judging by the tone of his voice and the tight, tense look of Ignis' shoulders, this wasn't information Noct was supposed to know. "But she said something was stopping her from getting too close."

"Explains why she bowled me over, at least," Noct said. They reached the top of the stairs, where Ignis and Gladio flashed their badges to a security guard, and entered the lush, private sitting room that was the king's balcony. The stage was at a perfect angle below them, and the crowd flashed with the occasional phone camera, angled up to catch a glimpse of the king. Regis sat with Rose, who was slipping him candy out of her handbag in what Noct supposed she thought was a surreptitious manner, but the chair beside him was empty. He waved Noct over, and Noct slid through a row of bored Kingsglaive and Crownsguard soldiers to sit down on the edge, glancing around for Nyx. He finally caught him on the other side of the balcony, but before he could say anything to get his attention, a blast of horns nearly made him fall out of his chair.

"Here we are," Regis said. "Just in time."

The curtain slowly slid back, gathering up in heavy folds on either side, to reveal an elaborate set made to look like the Tenebraean royal manor. A woman in white ran out to the center of the stage, her long white hair braided with flowers.

"Oh, don't be a fool!" another woman cried, racing after her to take her arm. "You forget your place, my lady. To say that you're in love with the Lucian prince--"

"I don't know what I am," the woman with white hair said. "All I know is that my heart burns hot at the sight of him, that all I once loved has gone grey and faded as the distant sea..."

Noct leaned forward on his knees. Was this supposed to be about the Oracle King? He'd heard of him, sure, but it wasn't much of a romance, if that's what they were going for. He opened one of the packets of nuts the others bought him, and Gladio, seated at his side, held out a hand. Noct grinned and tipped some into his palm.

"Is that shield-like behavior?" Noct whispered.

"It's a symbiotic relationship," Gladio whispered back. "Feed me chocolate, I save your skin."

"Hush," Ignis hissed, tapping Gladio in the back of the head. "This is the best monologue in the play, you uncultured--"

The entire balcony erupted into a frenzy of hissing as people shushed Ignis, who turned such a deep shade of red that he looked like he wanted to burst into flame on the spot. Noct wordlessly passed him the bag of chocolates, and he shoved his hand in it with a grimace of thanks.

There was another hissing sound, just over Noct's shoulder. Softer, though. Too ringing to be human. He stiffened, and when a shadow passed over him, he twisted just in time for the blade in the Kingsglaive soldier's hand to scrape along his collarbone, wedging at last in the tense muscle of his bicep. Noct grabbed the man by the collar and shoved the chair back to throw him off balance, using it as leverage to swing him over his shoulder and onto the floor. Noct wrenched out the blade--It wasn't in deep enough to do any real damage--and pressed it to the man's neck, tilting his chin up as he locked the man's arms with his legs, straddling him on the stone floor of the balcony.

It all took less than three seconds. Blood roared in Noct's ears. His fingers tightened on the hilt of the knife--a rookie mistake--and he forced himself to relax, holding the blade with the grim confidence of one who knew the warmth of a slit throat against his palm.

"Message," the Glaive said. He was an unfamiliar face, with tufts of reddish hair sticking out from under his hood, and his eyes were cold and lifeless. "Message for you."

Out of the corner of his eye, Noct was aware of Gladio on his feet, sword drawn, of Clarus at his back. The audience was in an uproar, whispering and shouting and drowning out the actors on stage, who still gamely tried to continue their scene. Noct let the tip of the blade dig in, nicking the Glaive's skin.

"Go on," he said. "Get it over with."

"You're welcome," the Glaive said, and let his head fall back. Noct threw the knife to the side, and jumped at the light touch of hands on his shoulder.

"It's me," Nyx said. "Sorry."

Noct stood, his arm dripping with blood, and the Glaive was swarmed by soldiers. When he looked up, it was into a sea of lights, small white flares against the shadows of the theater, bobbing and flashing. 

"You're welcome," he said. He could feel the anger boiling under his skin, threatening to spill over. "You're _welcome._ He expects me to be grateful for this?"

"The Glaives may be compromised," Clarus said, and Noct felt Nyx slowly release him, drawing back. "We need to contact Drautos."

"A potion first," Gladio said. Noct looked to him in confusion as Gladio summoned a small glass flask and cracked it over Noct's shoulder. The liquid inside burst over his skin, dulling the pain of the wound and stemming the flow of blood. Noct shakily placed a hand over his arm and searched for the cut. There wasn't even a scar.

"The hell was that?" he whispered, but in the chaos that was the king's balcony, no one else seemed to hear.

An hour later, Noct sat in one of the large chairs in Clarus Amicitia's office, touching the unmarked skin where the wound used to be. With Regis, Clarus, and Gladio in the room together, it made the expansive office feel cramped and close, and Noct wondered, vaguely, when they'd stop fussing and let him go back to his room. Of course the Glaives were compromised. They were perfect candidates for spies; Marginalized, probably not paid enough, constantly put at risk to find a prince who kept trying to kill them. Noct would kick himself for not remembering Ardyn's basic lessons in subterfuge, but it was too late for that. 

He wondered how the potions were made. Was it a medical breakthrough, or something closer to magitek?

The door opened, then, and for just a moment, all thought rushed from Noct's mind, replaced by blinding panic. He stood, tipping his chair over, and summoned a sword from his armiger.

"Woah," Gladio said. "Easy, Noct."

"It's only Titus," Clarus said.

"Noctis," Regis added. "Your sword."

Noct licked dry lips. Captain Drautos of King Regis' Kingsglaive stood at the door, entirely at ease, watching Noctis with a level gaze. He _was_ familiar, somehow, in a distant sort of way, but Noct couldn't look at him without his heartbeat spiking, his throat constricting painfully. He couldn't breathe.

"You said Titus," Noct croaked.

"Titus Drautos," Regis said. His voice was soothing. Soft. "An old friend. A family friend."

Noct banished the sword with a wrench of his magic, and Titus took a step into the room. Noct staggered back.

Ardyn had told him, once, that he had an imaginary friend named Titus. Maybe he was just trying to cover all of his bases, hiding what memories remained in a blanket of half-truths. Maybe it was something else. Maybe Titus was important, somehow. Noct watched him carefully, and saw in his face something that looked uncomfortably like guilt. It was fleeting, masked quickly with concern, but it was there. Noct edged towards the wall, keeping his distance.

Titus bowed to Regis. "I've gathered the Glaives. I understand you want two investigations to be made."

"Internal and external," Clarus said. "There are a number who have attached themselves to Noctis--"

"Nyx wouldn't," Noct said. The others looked at him. "He wouldn't go over to Ardyn's side. Him and Crowe, at least, and Libertus. They don't fit the profile."

Titus raised a brow. "What profile, exactly?"

"The basic one," Noct said, avoiding Titus to stare at the window. "Look, neither of them have people waiting for them in Galahd. All their ties are in Insomnia. Niflheim goes for people they can exploit, people with something to lose. If they don't have anything, that makes them desperate, and unless you can buy them off, they'll change sides as soon as something better comes along."

"An interesting insight," Titus said. "Then why would they reveal themselves now?"

"The Glaive said it already." Noct leaned against the wall, keeping close to Gladio. Gladio looked from him to Titus, confusion clear on his face, but moved between them, standing at his side. "It's a message. They're planning something else, and it doesn't matter if you know there are spies. It'll happen anyways. That's their point."

"We'll root them out," Clarus said, and Titus nodded. "They won't have long to hide."

Titus' smile was mirthless. "That's true enough." He looked to Noct. "I'm sorry that we couldn't meet under better circumstances. Maybe I should pay you a visit when things die down."

"You'll probably be busy," Noct said, fingers tightening on his arms.

Titus shrugged, and Noct felt his throat constrict again, a spasm that shook him to his spine. "I'll make the time."


	23. Chapter 23

In the lower levels of the Citadel, where moonlight filtered through the Kingsglaive training yards and spilled into the hall, soldiers waited before a heavy iron door. Libertus Ostium grunted as he shifted position, and turned on the radio hanging from a hook on the wall. Static filled the hallway, muffling the whispers of the few Glaives up next for questioning, and a woman's voice rang through the air.

_This evening, His Radiance the Emperor Iedolas Aldercapt has announced that the Colony of Galahd is to undergo preparation for the testing of a new weapon in the fight against Lucis._

Nyx Ulric, sitting against the wall at Libertus' side, lifted his head. The Glaives around them had gone silent, watchful, fixed on the radio as it swung gently on its hook.

_The Diamond Weapon, as Chief Researcher Verstael Besithia has named it, is a state of the art magitek hybrid that has already made waves in the scientific community after testing in the West District of Gralea._

Amos Khara, sitting at the kitchen table in the half-built village that used to be his parents' hometown, leaned over to look at his mother. She was holding her breath, poised on her seat like a coeurl ready to leap, staring at the radio as though it were a fire spreading over the kitchen floor. Amos looked past her, to the picture of his uncle Pelna next to the radio, smiling crookedly in his sleek Kingsglaive uniform.

"Hey," Amos said. "Hey, ma. Ma, it's okay."

His mother didn't answer. 

_The Diamond Weapon is set to be deployed in the uninhabited archipelago of Galahd next week. His Radiance the Emperor assures his subjects that those who remain on the outlying islands for relief efforts will be perfectly safe._

The great gate of the West District of Gralea wasn't nearly high enough to block the wind that lifted particles of the Scourge over the quarantine wall, but Ardyn, watching black specks flit between snowflakes and sink into the sidewalk below, said nothing of it. He dug his hands in his pockets and faced the silence of the West District, his face a ruin of shadow and Scourge, and tried not to think of the man who would have scaled the walls with his bare hands to get to the afflicted, once upon a time.

Instead, he thought of Noctis.

Noctis, who at that moment was wiping dried blood off his bare shoulder, prodding the skin for evidence of a wound that was no longer there. Noctis, a cat twining around his feet, a shield-to-be sitting in the bedroom dressed in a fine suit, never alone for more than a minute at a time. Noctis, leaning against the sink while a hazy memory stirred in the depths, disjointed and distant.

His father's hair was darker, then. He had a bottle in his hands, thin and fragile, and he was talking to Noct, who lay on the floor at his feet with a stuffed coeurl in his arms.

Magic filled the air. It was a thick feeling, not the insistent tickle of fire or ice or lightning, more like a heavy blanket draping over Noct's back. The water in the bottle shone with a brilliant green light, a small star in Regis' hands.

"Gladio," Noct said. Gladio looked up, his legs crossed comfortably, Etro shedding smugly on his lap. "Can people... heal, in Insomnia?"

"You and the king can, I guess. It runs in your family." Gladio shifted. "Why?"

Noct looked down at the scar curving along his side. The line on his neck. The stab wounds and shallow scrapes, the messy, jagged lump of his first attempt at stitches, the burn from a misplaced spell.

He remembered those frantic moments in the cave, trying to push Pelna back together. The heat of blood on his hands.

"No reason."

Gladio's brows knit together, and he reached up to rub the scar that ran over his own eye, a straight line down his brow and cheek. "You know," he said.

The bedroom door rattled on its hinges, and Noct and Gladio both startled, jerking to their feet. Gladio drew a shortsword from its sheath, but Noct took a moment to usher Etro into the bathroom, where she blinked up at him with wide, soulful eyes.

"Fuck, tone it down," Noct whispered. She meeped, then practically levitated as the door slammed open. Noct hissed in pain as needle-like claws dragged at his arms, and turned to face the door, where Nyx Ulric was wrenching his arm free of a Crownsguard soldier's grip. His eyes were wild, desperate, and for a moment, dread weighed Noct down, holding him fast. Of course. Of course it was too good to be true. Of course Nyx was with Ardyn.

Then Nyx spoke.

"The hell is a diamond weapon?" he asked. Gladio had a hand on his chest, trying to push him back, but Nyx just ripped one of his uniform buttons off, tossing it at Noct. He warped, magic falling about them like snow, and took Noct by the arm. Etro hissed from Noct's shoulder, trembling.

"Diamond--" Noct started.

"It's a Nif thing," Nyx said. "A diamond weapon. The radio says they're sending one to Galahd. You were with the chancellor--if he told you, if you know--"

"Hey," Gladio said. Nyx pulled up a wall between them, blocking him and Noct off from the rest of the room. 

"Give me a second," Noct said, tugging out of Nyx's hold. "I don't know, I... Wait. Diamond weapon? Like... The daemon?" Nyx gave him a blank look. "The emperor had a report about it a few weeks ago. Something Besithia's cooking up, I guess, but I thought it was decommissioned. It took out the whole West District of Gralea."

Nyx cursed. "Well, it's on the way to Galahd," he said. "The Kingsglaive's in an uproar. If something isn't done--"

"Oh," Noct said. He placed a hand on the wall, mind racing. "This is why Dad sent the message. The Glaives do have something to lose. If there's a daemon heading for Galahd, the spies'll have to strike soon. If they stay loyal, they lose Galahd. If the king doesn't do something, he loses the Glaive."

"Then I need to warn the king," Nyx said. He looked back at the magical wall, which Gladio was trying to break with the hilt of his sword. "Shit."

Noct looked back into the bathroom and gently lowered Etro to the ground. There was a window next to the mirror, opening up into the far side of the Citadel.

"Where's the... Where's Regis?" he asked.

"Probably in an emergency council meeting," Nyx said. "They hold them near the throne room, on the top floor of the Citadel."

"Great. Of course they do." Noct clambered onto the sink and tapped on the window. "How good are you at warping?"

Pretty good, it turned out. Nyx warped like Ardyn, with bright, flashy bursts of light, moving in a dangerous arc of magic like a stuttering firework along the wall. Noct was more direct, keeping close to the side, phasing at the end of each warp just in case his feet slipped or his hands missed a ledge.

Somewhere on the fiftieth floor or so, Noct slithered off a window and slammed his shoulder against the wall, tumbling back into the dark. He reared his arm to throw a dagger, and light surrounded him, an arm wrapped around his waist, Nyx's knee supporting his legs as they fell.

"Warp together," Nyx shouted, and Noct threw his dagger just as Nyx threw his, straight at the wall. They both connected with a crack of stone, and Noct warped to the hilt of his, breathing hard. Nyx's arm was still wrapped around him, and his cheek brushed Noct's as he drew back.

"You okay?" Nyx asked. His face was more angular in the darkness, his eyes shadowed. "You wanna bust a window?"

"Nah, let's keep going," Noct said. He hung there a moment, catching his breath. "Never warped like that before. I didn't know you _could._ "

"Well, you know me," Nyx said, teeth flashing. "I'm full of surprises. Come on, let's keep going."

When they finally reached the right floor, Noct could feel the well of his magic running dry, bringing with it the dizzy, light-headed feeling of stasis. It was why he ignored Nyx when Nyx suggested, reasonably, that they break a window to an unused room, and went straight for the one that glowed with light, flickering with the shapes of people shifting around. Broken glass spilled onto the carpet as Noct rolled out, his bare feet sliding on the shards. Nyx followed after him, but instead of steadying himself from his fall, Nyx dropped into a kneel, head down, fist at his heart.

"What in the gods' names..." Regis said, rising from his chair.

"Okay," Noct said, barefoot and shirtless before the most powerful people in Lucis. "I can explain."

Half the council rose to their feet. Titus Drautos, standing at the door by the king's side, passed through them like a shark through minnows, and Noct and Nyx both tensed as he rounded the corner of the table. He stripped off his jacket, the bright buttons gleaming, and passed it over to Noct.

"Get out of that mess, boy," he said, and Noct was surprised to see Nyx jerk as though intending to obey. "Both of you," Titus said, giving Nyx a sideways smile. Noct shrugged on the jacket, breathing in the scent of mint, and unconsciously dipped his hand into an inner pocket. He pulled out a packet of breath mints and stared at them thoughtfully.

"You always did keep these on you," he said, but Titus was already gone, heading back to the king. Noct dragged Nyx to his feet, but Nyx dropped back into a kneel as soon as they reached Regis, and the skin of his cheeks looked strangely ashen. 

"Your... Reg..." Noct glanced at the council, most of whom were talking in loud, furious voices, with Clarus' slipping among them, guiding them back to their seats. "I know what Niflheim's planning," he said. "And I know what we need to do."

Regis beckoned for a chair, but Noct shook his head. "Son," Regis said, and one of the council members nearby raised their brows. "There's a time and place."

"I know, but this is it." Noct projected his voice, trying to give it the cadence of command that Ardyn's had, sometimes, when senior officials were coming up against his orders. "The empire is sending a daemon to Galahd. A daemon with the ability to wipe out the entire archipelago, and they're announcing this the night they reveal that they have agents in the Citadel. This means those agents are being given a choice. Turn against Lucis, or lose Galahd."

"Then we don't give them that choice," a member of the council said, an older man with white hair to his shoulders. "We cut them free of his majesty's power and put them in holding--"

"And Galahd dies," Nyx said. He caught Regis' cold, discerning stare and looked back. "Your majesty."

"Yeah, that's a shit option, thanks," Noct said. He could almost hear Ardyn tsking in disapproval in the back of his mind. "I mean, okay. We can't save the islands."

"We?" Titus murmured.

"But we can save the people," Noct said. "It's gonna take days to transport the daemon, and Niflheim wants to give their agents time to react. So we hire boats from Galdin and--"

"Hire them how?" Clarus asked.

"Clarus," someone else said. "Surely you don't--"

"Hire them how?" Clarus asked again. 

"Bribes," Noct said. "Daemon-warding lights for the boats. A stable source of electricity to Galdin. Citizenship to Insomnia. There are plenty of things people want. Anyways, we give the Glaives the chance to save their people. Evacuate the islands, bring them to Insomnia--"

"Doubling our refugees," the white-haired man said. Noct shot him a dark look.

"Yeah, there's that famous Insomnian hospitality I heard about," Noct said. Titus coughed into his fist, and Nyx gave Noct a warning look. "And you offer pardons to the agents in the Glaive. Full pardons. They can have their magic taken away later if you want, sure, but they won't lose their right to be here."

"That's a dangerous proposition," Regis said. "If they turn on us..."

"Then they're turning on their own people," Noct said. "The emperor's been wanting to make a show of power for years. He'll destroy what's left of Galahd whether they obey him or not. The least we can do is try and evacuate the islands before it's too late."

"It's possible," Titus said. "Risky, but possible." 

Regis glanced at Noct out of the corner of his eye. "Thank you, Noctis," he said, and a hush fell over the council room. "You show compassion befitting a prince of Lucis." 

Noct felt heat rise to his cheeks, and dipped into a short, awkward bow.

"Your majesty. Captain." Nyx' voice was low, nothing like the casual tone he used with Noct. "May I have permission to escort his highness to his rooms?"

Regis' formal manner dropped for a flash, revealing a dry humor in his sea-grey eyes. "Only if you take the stairs."

Noct was out the door before he realized, belatedly, that he was still wearing Titus Drautos' jacket.

"Don't worry about it," Nyx said, when he caught Noct glancing over his shoulder. "And don't go back. Not sure how much more of that I can take. Sit down, let me get a look at your feet."

"My feet are fine," Noct said. Which was true, in a way, if he ignored the slivers of pain that ran up the soles. Nyx gave him a weary look and pointed to the carpet. "Gods, fine."

Nyx sat with him in the middle of the hall, holding Noct's right foot as he checked it for glass. "You have a high pain tolerance," he said. "Most people would've asked for a potion at least."

"I'm starting to think you guys are too dependent on those," Noct said, reaching for his other foot. There was a gash in the sole, right along the softest part of his skin, and blood ran down the side and dripped on the floor. "How are they made, anyways? Liquid, right?"

"I'm not sure," Nyx said. "There's a lot we don't know."

Noct frowned, pressing down on the wound. "Blood's a liquid," he said, in a soft voice.

"What's that?"

Noct tried to remember the feeling of the warm, heavy magic in Regis' hands. It felt closest to fire, but there was something else... He pooled magic from his veins, letting it rock in his palm like clear water, and waited for the prickle of elemental magic to dissipate. What remained had weight to it, but it felt empty, somehow, like it needed something else to give it strength.

Carefully, Noct pressed the magic to the trickle of blood on his foot.

"Fuck!" Noct bent over as the blood shone with a bright, blinding light, lacing together with his magic like the world's worst peroxide to burn out the wound. Nyx went to his knees, holding Noct up by the shoulders, but the light was already fading, leaving him with the unsteady feeling of stasis, a thrumming in his head.

"Did you use your own..." Nyx swiped a thumb over Noct's foot. The cut was gone, nothing but new skin and bloodstains. "Noct, I've never--Noct?"

"What do you know, Dad," Noct said. His voice slurred, his drawl thicker than Ardyn's. "You're not the only healer in town after all."

He swayed forward, and the last thing he heard before the darkness took him was the wavering sound of Nyx's voice in his ear, frantically calling his name.


	24. Chapter 24

Noct walked along the main street of an unfamiliar town, its lampposts draped with banners and garlands, brickwork bathed in the glow of the setting sun. A warm wind rustled the banners and sent blossoms floating through the air, but Noct's feet didn't so much as stir the flowers that fell in great drifting clouds over the cobbles. Ardyn knelt some ways before him, dark red hair tied back in a ponytail, holding the hand of a woman laid out on a stretcher. She spoke softly, and when he laughed in response, he ran a hand over her patchy, mottled skin.

"He coughs in the night." 

Noct jumped. A man--Gilgamesh--loped beside him, a silver half mask fitted over his scarred face. His white hair was bundled together with strips of leather, a tradition reserved for shields to the king, and his clothes were less for fashion, as Ardyn's were, as for wear. He looked past Noct, who followed his gaze to the goddess from the tombs, the one who had shown him a young Ardyn on a hill before it all began. Her eyes were open now, green and clear.

"He won't stop, sometimes," Gilgamesh said. "He says he's fine, but Shiva, his teeth are stained black, after. And his eyes..."

 _The crystal will purify the king of light,_ the goddess said. Shiva. She looked at Noct, then. _You must have faith. When the time comes, he must submit to the crystal willingly._

"I don't understand," Noct and Gilgamesh said.

Shiva held Noct's gaze. _You will._

"Gilgamesh!" Noct flinched at the sound of Ardyn's voice, and saw him waving an arm in the middle of a crowd of supplicants. "Stop flirting with pretty goddesses and shield me!"

Gilgamesh sighed and ran off, boots picking up lumps of bruised petals. Shiva closed her eyes.

 _He always did flatter me,_ she said. _They say I am the cruelest of the gods. Perhaps I am. I have loved humanity for too long, and much of what I thought I did for love became cruel, in time._ She lay a hand on Noct's sleeve, and he felt the chill of her fingers through his jacket. Ice clung to her eyelashes like crystals, dusting her cheeks. _I love him dearly, little king. But there is one I love more, and I would level the earth itself if he brings her pain._ Her eyes opened, and Noct fell back before her. _Soon, you will have to make a choice._

The vision faded. Noct fell through the dream, crashing into a ceiling of thin, fractured glass, and landed on a metal hallway in Gralea. Titus Drautos stood before him, holding out his hand. Beckoning.

"You must be lost," he said. Noct stayed where he was, frozen in a wave of terror. "Let me bring you home, boy. Let me bring you home." 

He held a hand over Noct's mouth, and Noct cried out, opening his eyes to the grey light of morning.

"Noctis?" Regis was lying on the couch in front of the bed, a book in his lap. He swung his long legs off the arm of the couch and winced. "Was it a nightmare?"

Noct held a hand to his throat. "I don't know. I'm not sure. Where.. Where's Nyx? Gladio?"

"Gladiolus is outside, fretting," Regis said. "Nyx Ulric should be preparing for a mission to Galahd, but I expect he's in the hall as well." Noct narrowed his eyes, and Regis smiled. "It seems you inspire no small amount of loyalty."

"Yeah," Noct said, his voice painfully dry. "That's what it is." 

Regis' lips thinned, but he didn't press the subject. "Your plan saw some changes, but the general thrust of it is the same. Accordo is sending a fleet under the guise of escorting government employees, and the Glaive will be there in secret to evacuate the archipelago."

"Any chance of the empire catching on?" Noct asked.

"Oh, certainly." Regis limped to the bed and lay a hand on Noct's brow. "No fever, at least. Care to explain why you tried to turn your own body into a makeshift potion?"

Noct shrugged. "No one said I couldn't."

"Gods, if your mother could hear you now," Regis said. His hand moved to brush back Noct's hair, and Noct sat up, moving to give Regis room. He sat with a grateful sigh and unfastened the metal brace over his knee. "Aulea always said you inherited my recklessness. Noctis. You heal with blood when there's no other recourse, and even then, the magic needed may kill you. Caelums _have_ died that way."

"Did you ever try it?" Noct asked. Regis leaned next to him, back against the headboard, and blinked as Etro oozed off Noct's pillow and made a disgruntled _mrrt_.

"Once," Regis said. He scratched Etro's neck. 

"Ardyn used to heal without potions." They'd been dancing around the subject since he'd been found, skirting the truth of Ardyn's past like a vast pit in the middle of the floor. "After the fall of Solheim."

Regis was silent for a long moment. "The gods gave Ardyn his power. Just as they gave us our own."

"They didn't, though," Noct said. His chest felt light, fluttering with an excitement he couldn't quite name. "Ardyn always knew how to heal. I think his _mother_ could heal. Sure, it's been diluted, but if it's in our bloodline, maybe... Maybe that's the only real magic we have. The only magic that's _ours._ "

"Don't trust speculation alone, Noctis," Regis said. "And please, refrain from stopping your heart just to heal a scrape or two. Conduits for spell-crafting exist for a reason. You do use conduits, yes? Water, sand, metal?"

Noct shrugged. "Sometimes. Ardyn likes his magic raw."

"Gods above," Regis whispered. "That shouldn't be possible."

Noct frowned. Raw spell-making wasn't difficult, exactly. Not when it was done right. When Noct was learning about the weather in his science lessons, Ardyn had taught him how to trap raw lightning in a glass globe, and they practiced separating frost and fire in little metal boxes. It was easier to make magic stick if he used something real as a base, but it wasn't impossible.

"Do you know how to detect magic?" Noct asked. "Like, how to tell how much of each element you have, and which one takes up more energy?"

"To an extent," Regis said. "But it's an imperfect art, as you know."

Noct wove his fingers together, hands propped on his knee. The thought came to him slowly, shamefully, creeping into the edge of his awareness. He was stronger than Regis. It was strange to have more control over his power than someone else, particularly when Ardyn could wipe the floor with him without a thought, but Noct was always aware of his magic, always ready to draw it like a sword, yet another weapon in his arsenal.

He reached for the warmth of healing magic again and found it, nestled deep in the core of his power. It was hidden, somehow, blocked by the elements Noct had spent half of his life trying to master, and Noct carefully teased it out, drawing a path for himself direct to the source.

Regis placed a hand on Noct's arm, and the connection severed.

"Noctis," Regis said. "Remember what I said about recklessness."

Noct sighed and sank back into the sheets. Etro chirped and padded over to lay on his head, and he pushed her fur aside so he could see. "You can't blame me for wanting to learn," he said.

"Give it a day, and I'll teach you," Regis said. "We'll have time."

When Noct woke again, Regis was dozing next to him, a hand draped over Noct's shoulder, Etro on his knees. The cat blinked at Noct and cried weakly, and Noct climbed out of bed to feed her.

When he was done, he stopped a moment, watching Regis. He looked so much older than he should have been, with soft wrinkles at his eyes and white in his silver hair, his hands too thin and his leg shaking with every step. Noct picked up his cane, tracing the dragon head at the top, and remembered what Ardyn had taught him about the ring of the Lucii. It was connected to the crystal, draining the life of every king and queen who wore it, siphoning their magic to fuel the wall.

On average, the kings and queens of Insomnia rarely ruled for more than fifteen years. 

Regis had been reigning for thirty-four. 

Noct set the cane down and approached the bed. The ring lay on Regis' left hand, heavy and black, with a small crystal lodged in the center. Noct raised a hand to it, and for an instant, the walls of his room fell away. He was a child hiding from a blizzard that wailed with a human voice, and there was a corpse in the darkness, skeletal fingers bearing a ring with a pale crystal at its heart.

"Regis?" Noct said, and Regis opened his eyes partway.

"Not yet, darling," he murmured, and Noct ran a hand through his hair, which fell to his shoulders in waves. Then Regis stirred, rising to his elbows. "Ah, Noctis. Has Clarus arrived?"

"Don't think so," Noct said. He summoned a hair tie from his armiger. "I'm gonna... Go outside, if that's okay. Clear my head. Is Cor free?"

"None of us will be today, I fear," Regis said. "But Ignis or Gladio will surely have the time."

That wasn't exactly true. Noct urged Regis to sleep a little longer and got dressed, leaving Drautos' jacket on a hook by the door. When he left, Regis was going through a tablet, drinking from a can of iced coffee from his armiger, and if Nyx had been waiting for him before, he was long gone. The only people Noct recognized in the hall were Gladio and Ignis, who were speaking to a man in official black and gold council robes a few yards off.

"Circumstances have not changed our stance," the man was saying. He had fine black hair and a handsome face, with deep laugh lines around his mouth. "The offer still stands, should you want to make a claim--"

"No," Gladio said. His feet were planted perfectly apart, as though he were preparing to brace for a blow. "My stance hasn't changed either."

"Mr. Amicitia, your family has roots in the royal line, however distant. If your blood runs true--"

"I gave you my answer when I turned eighteen," Gladio said. " _And_ at nineteen. And twenty. I'm a shield, sir."

"A shield to whom? We don't know this boy. Raised in Niflheim, a killer of his own people, dangerously unstable... We feel for his plight, we do, but for the good of Lucis, we must look to the future."

"That's nice," Gladio said. "I'll remember you said that, when I take my father's place in council."

"Ah, Noct," Ignis said, loud enough for his voice to echo down the hall. Gladio stiffened, and the man he spoke to backed up a step, lips parted. "You're up early."

"Oh, you know," Noct said. "Have to get my mandatory killing in before noon."

"True," Ignis said. "There's so little time in the day. Did you want to fit in a little treason during lunch?"

Noct grinned. "Of course. That goes without saying."

"Excellent."

"Your highness," the man said, giving him a shallow bow. "I hope you didn't misconstrue my meaning just now."

"Don't worry," Noct said. "I didn't."

The man straightened. "I'd... Best be off. Excuse me." He practically booked it down the hall, his robes flapping behind him like the wings of a disgruntled bird.

"Sorry about that," Gladio said, turning to Noct. "He was an asshole."

"I mean, he wasn't wrong," Noct said. He tucked his hands in his pockets. "So he's been after you as a successor?"

Gladio's face darkened. "One of my great grandparents was _your_ great-great uncle," he said. "We didn't inherit the magic, but it doesn't stop people from being dumbasses about it."

"We're cousins?" Noct asked. He looked Gladio up and down. There certainly wasn't a resemblance so far as he could see.

"Technically, but so are me and Ignis," Gladio said. "Ten ancestors back and once removed."

"A terrible mistake on our part, I'm sure," Ignis said, and Gladio shoved him. "The nobility are all related somehow. When your families go back to the founding, like the Scientias and Amicitias, bloodlines get a little muddled."

"And he _was_ wrong," Gladio said. "Don't think I missed you steering the conversation."

"Yeah, well." Noct grimaced. It made sense that the council would want someone like Gladio on the throne. Or Ignis. He wondered if anyone had approached him yet, or if royal blood actually mattered to them.

"He represents a minority on the council," Ignis said. "A minority which will be overruled as soon as they get to know you."

"No one said I wanted to be king in the first place," Noct said. "Look, I was thinking of going fishing or something."

"Hell yeah," Gladio said, and Ignis closed his eyes in what looked like a silent prayer. Still, when Gladio and Noct made for the elevator, Ignis followed all the same. He made them stop in the kitchens first, where he flirted with the sous chef for a solid ten minutes and got a bag of sandwiches and drinks for his trouble. 

"That's how you do it," Gladio said, his voice thick with outrage. "You little weasel."

"I can't help my natural charm," Ignis said, and Noct snorted. They strode out into the empty grass at the back of the Citadel, winding around a miniature rose garden and a series of fountains shaped like astrals, until they came to the manmade lake Noct had visited before, the dark water gleaming in the light of the sun.

Except this time, the dock wasn't empty.

Titus Drautos sat on the dock, his grey undershirt unbuttoned to his chest, holding a fishing rod in one hand. His face was turned to the sun, and the light that played over his cheeks made a mask of him, patched with the shadow of the wall like the lines of an old tree. 

"Maybe we should come back later," Gladio said.

"How on earth does he have the time?" Ignis asked. Titus twitched the line, making ripples across the smooth surface of the lake.

"You guys set up," Noct said. "I'm gonna head over."

"I'll go with you," Gladio said, but Noct held up a hand. 

"It's fine," he said. "I promise." Gladio gave him an uncertain look, but hung back, taking out the drinks from Ignis' bag. Noct pulled his shoes off at the edge of the dock and stood on the boards for a second, soaking in the warmth, before he padded towards Titus' hunched form. He stopped a few feet away, just close enough for his shadow to cross Titus' path, and Titus lifted his head.

"Sit down if you want to," Titus said. Noct forced himself to take three more steps, then sank to the boards, feet dangling over the edge, Titus was watching the water, his hands slack on the rod.

"Still afraid of me, huh," he said, reeling in the line a foot or so. A dragonfly flitted over his head and went skimming across the water, wings glittering.

"I don't know about that," Noct said. "Maybe I wanted to thank you for the jacket."

"Hm. Well. I heard you were self-conscious about the scars," Titus said. Noct blinked. 

"Who told you that?"

Titus reeled in the line, checked the lure, then cast it out again. "Not sure if I ever told you this, Noctis, but I have three brothers and two sisters back in Galahd. Seven nieces and nephews, four cousins... They all went to the boats when the empire attacked. Me, I went to Insomnia."

"You'll be able to get them out, though?" Noct asked. He looked over his shoulder, where Gladio and Ignis were talking by a fountain, watching them.

"Maybe. If they'll go. I haven't seen them in twenty years, now." Titus' smile didn't quite reach his eyes. "It's funny, but out of all those kids, you're the only one who's been around to call me Uncle Titus. You don't use that name anymore, of course."

He cast out the line again, sending the lure arching over the still and quiet lake. 

"These days, I suppose you know me better as Glauca."


	25. Chapter 25

"Sit down."

The order dropped into Noct's mind like a lead weight, pushing through the panic that rose to his throat, bringing with it the burn of magic in his palms. General Glauca, the unstoppable, merciless enforcer of imperial will, the man who toppled the last of Tenebrae's defenses and could clear a town with just the rumor of his coming, held Noct's wrist in an iron grip and carefully lowered him back to the dock.

"You don't want to get them involved," he said.

Noct made himself look to Gladio and Ignis, sitting together in the grass. "The three of us--" he started.

"Oh, you might stand a chance," Glauca--Titus--said, still holding Noct's wrist. "If you had time. But Gladiolus? He's the pampered son of an old house, raised in luxury. He can fight, of course, but he's never gone up against someone who truly wants to kill him. And Ignis?" He smiled. "I could use him in the Glaive, but I wouldn't consider him a threat. No, let's keep this civil. I like civil. Less fuss. No mess."

"You killed Ravus' _mother,_ " Noct said. 

"And you killed a mother of three," said Titus. "Tian. She was twenty-one. Just joined the Kingsglaive. I still look after her children on the weekends."

"You sent her after me."

" _You_ slit her throat." Titus let the rod go slack, ignoring the fish tugging on the line. "What a fine pair of killers we make."

Noct's stomach rolled. He grabbed at the post holding up the dock and turned aside, looking down into the murky water. Titus slowly released his wrist.

"We both have blood on our hands, boy. You're set on Queen Sylva because she meant something to you, but everyone means something to someone. Even MTs, poor, sick creatures. They used to be human. Imagine who they could have been. All the potential lost on the edge of your blade."

Noct dug his nails into the wood. "It's not like that," he said. "You knew who I was. You could've brought me home. I didn't have to... _become_ this."

"And the emperor would have sent me my siblings' hands," Titus said. His voice was level and calm. "I refused an order once. When I opened the box at my door--"

"No," Noct said. "Don't."

"I couldn't take the risk," Titus said. "Not after that. The most I could do was hope that one of my soldiers would take you in, or Ardyn would grow bored of you."

"Bored--he isn't--he wouldn't--"

Titus gave him a pitying look. Noct felt splinters bite under his nails. 

"We're none of us the center of the universe, Noctis," he said. "I cared for you, but you weren't family. You weren't Galahd."

"Ravus tried to bring me back," Noct said. 

"Ravus is a fool." Titus finally picked up the line, the rod bending under the weight of the fish on the other end. "But he isn't why we're having this talk, boy. You are. Noctis Izunia." He tilted his head, regarding Noct with a cold eye. "Your reputation threatens to overtake my own, and according to some, you chose it. And then you come here. Your orders were clear--Ardyn dropped enough hints the last time we spoke to guess--but the moment you saw the king, it all fell apart. It seems that even Ardyn's influence cannot override your nature."

"The fuck do you know about my _nature?_ " Noct grit out.

"That it lends itself towards mercy," Titus said. "Do you think the council would have lifted a finger for Galahd if you hadn't intervened? Even your father would have taken the loss. But here you are, some poor soul Ardyn dirtied and cast out--"

"Stop." Noct felt for his armiger, magic fizzing just within reach. "That's not what I am."

"Alright." Titus shrugged. "It's curious, that's all. So I thought it only fair that I give you a fighting chance." He sat up as a fish broke the surface of the water, scales flashing in the light. "Look at that. Good size, do you think?"

Noct said nothing. Titus sighed and lifted the fish out of the water. A pair of pliers materialized in his hand, and he twisted the lure free, letting the fish fall back into the lake. 

"For now, the Glaive are under my control," Titus said. "That little act the other day wasn't on my orders, which is concerning, but when the time comes, they'll follow me. You? Some of them hate you more than the king. But Nyx and Crowe have been sowing dissent in the ranks, lately, taking up your case. It makes it hard to keep a grip on them all."

"My heart bleeds," Noct said. Titus grunted.

"I'm sure it does. But the fact remains that when this is over, you'll have to do more than offer a pardon and sanctuary for refugees. You're showing a hint of mercy? Good. Now you put the work in. When the king dies--"

"When he _what?_ " Noct's voice echoed across the lake, and Gladio rose to his feet. Noct flapped a hand at him, but Gladio remained standing, watching them carefully.

"It's inevitable," Titus said. "When he dies, what kind of king will you make? Will you go back on your first promises? Lock the agents of Niflheim away? Ignore the refugees who live under the street? Hoard your power?"

"Of course I... That's how Solheim fell," Noct said. "Before the Astral War, the commoners ripped out the throne and killed the last king."

"Funny how no one mentions that." Titus reeled in the line. "When this is done, I'll be making my own choice. With my family out of the empire's hands, there won't be a need for General Glauca." He stood. "It's a shame, really. You were a good kid. I can only hope you'll make a halfway decent king."

Noct scrambled to his feet as Titus started off down the dock. "You can't just tell me this and walk away," he said. "What if I tell the king?"

"Then you tell the king," Titus said, over his shoulder. "And only half the Glaives go on the boats tonight. But it's your choice, of course."

"If you touch my father--" Noct said.

Titus kept walking. Gladio strode towards him, and Noct staggered forward, summoning the first links in a shield, but Titus simply said a few words and patted Gladio on the shoulder. Ignis moved past them, his shoes clacking on the dock as he approached, and Noct turned away before he could get a good look at his face. 

"Noctis?" His voice was low, careful. "What happened? Did he say something?"

"Nothing," Noct said. For a lie, it was a weak one--his hands were shaking, and his voice sounded strangely distant. "We just talked about Niflheim."

"Not exactly a tactful subject for him to pick," Ignis said. Noct laughed harshly, more like a bark than anything, and covered his face with a hand.

"I thought it was getting better," he said. He turned, and Ignis' eyes widened a fraction. He could only imagine what he saw. "Where's Nyx? Do you know?"

"Nyx?" Ignis glanced back at Gladio, who was heading towards them. "I don't... They're scheduled to ship out now, actually. It's why we were growing worried--they can't exactly leave without Drautos--Noct!"

Noct took off down the dock. He ducked around Gladio, who stopped with a _fuck, not this again_ and raced after him, but Noct phased out of his reach. Titus was nowhere in sight, but that didn't mean he was gone. There had to be a car lot somewhere, or a door to the lower levels, hell, even a godsdamned chocobo. Noct summoned an empty flask and tossed it, warping after it over the close-cropped grass. Gladio's shout of warning disappeared as he rounded the corner, and Noct only glanced once at the shadowy figure at the top of a high set of stairs before he barreled towards them. Maybe he could convince Titus to let him sneak aboard. Maybe he could tail him, get a hold of Nyx, warn him in time--

"Oh, gods!" 

Noct only had a second to wonder why, exactly, Titus' voice was so much higher than he remembered, before a white shape crashed into him, sending him rolling down the steps. Noct cursed, and the figure at the top of the stairs huffed and jogged down.

"Oh shit oh shit oh shit I killed the prince, my dog killed the prince, oh shit..."

Noct skidded to a halt, wincing at the sore, screaming ache of his arms and back, and looked up into the grinning face of Pryna, the dog from his first day in the Citadel. Prompto followed soon after, crouching over Noct with a hand out, his face pinched with worry.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "She keeps doing that. Oh gods. Are you okay?"

"Fine," Noct lied, getting to his feet. "Look, I gotta..." He stopped. Prompto's eyes were unnaturally red, his cheeks patchy with heat, and his glasses were slightly fogged. "You... Okay?"

"Yeah!" Prompto said, in a high voice. "Yeah, doing great! Just, uh, got turned away back there, so I need to, I don't know, go find somewhere dark and quiet to scream for the rest of my life, but fine!"

"Right," Noct said. Voices sounded around the corner. "I'm kind of in a--"

"The thing is, it's Luna," Prompto said. "She sent me a message. Like, Pryna just disappeared all of a sudden, and when she came back, Luna was, um, she was in a room surrounded by, there were guns, right--"

"Right," Noct said, eyeing the edge of the gardens. 

"And she said Ravus has the Scourge, but he's been put in quarantine, so she's gonna break out and--"

"What?" Noct's gaze skittered to Prompto, horror creeping into the edges of his mind. "Did you say the _Scourge?_ "

"He's been put in quarantine in one of the bases near Tenebrae," Prompto said. Pryna nosed at Noct's side, but Noct couldn't seem to raise his hand. "She says they're probably trying to blackmail her. So she's gonna break out, which means it's her against a whole fucking army of MTs, and when I went to the king I was turned away by some dumbass fucking guard, and that's when Pryna almost killed you."

Noct took a shaky breath. At that moment, General Glauca was on his way to Galdin, where he and half the other traitors on the Kingsglaive were going to be alone on a boat with Nyx, Libertus, and Crowe for days. "When did it happen?" Noct asked. His voice was a rasp. "When did he contract the plague?"

"I don't know," Prompto said. "No one knows. If he dies, Luna's... He's her _brother._ "

Gladio and Ignis took that second to round the corner. Ignis was red in the face and disheveled, his glasses knocked askew, while Gladio ran with a dogged, grim determination. Noct thought of Shiva's eyes staring at him in that faraway street, the chill of her hand on his arm.

_Soon, you will have to make a choice._

Noct looked back towards Galdin, cursed, and grabbed Prompto by the hand. Prompto flushed a darker pink.

"Prompto," Noct said. "You have a direct line to the Oracle?"

"I mean, sort of."

"Alright," Noct said. "A choice. I get it. I fucking get it. Come on, we're getting out of here."

He dragged Prompto down the steps, Pryna prancing at his heels. Prompto stumbled to keep up, pushing his glasses up his nose. "Uh, sorry, your highness, but when you say we're getting out of here..."

"We're breaking Ravus out of quarantine," Noct said, picking up the pace. Gladio shouted after them, and Prompto twisted around to stare. "And we're bringing him back to Luna. Because fuck me, I guess."

"Hey!" Gladio shouted. "Come back here!"

"Um, your highness," Prompto said.

"Look after my cat!" Noct shouted over his shoulder. "And Regis!"

"Aw, hell fucking no!" Gladio shouted back. Prompto's mouth dropped open, but Noct was tugging him down the steps and across the asphalt. 

"You got a car?" he shouted.

"Yes?" Prompto said. "Am I being--Is this a kidnapping? Am I being kidnapped right now?"

"No, it's a godsdamned rescue," Noct said, and Prompto whispered, _Oh, gods,_ in a small voice. "Don't worry, I'll keep you safe. Where's the car?"

"That one," Prompto said, pointing to a rusty, mustard-yellow van. "It's, um, my moms bought it for me when I was eighteen. It's kind of old--"

"It'll do," Noct said. They raced the rest of the way, and Noct slammed open the back door, gesturing for Prompto to get in. Prompto stepped inside, casting a wary look back at Gladio, who was only five feet away and closing. "Give me the keys," Noct said.

"Gods," Prompto said, and handed them to Noct. Noct climbed in the front seat, and Pryna jumped over him, settling on the passenger's side. Noct turned on the ignition and slammed on the gas just as Gladio grabbed the side door and heaved one foot on the bumper, hanging on for dear life. Another second, and the van dipped again, a thumping sound coming from the rear window.

"Uh, they're kind of... on us," Prompto said. Noct glanced back and locked the doors.

"Then they can hang on," he said, and crashed through the gate to the Citadel. Pryna let out a little huff, then shoved her head through the closed window to bark at Ignis and Gladio.

"What the fuck?" Noct shouted.

"She's magic!" Prompto shouted back.

"Stop the fucking van!" Gladio bellowed. 

Noct swerved into the main street, and Ignis and Gladio cursed. Pryna barked again, tail wagging in delight.

"You know, if they fall..." Prompto said.

"I know," Noct said, and Prompto cried out as the back window broke, Gladio's boot crashing clear through. "Dude! My car! You busted my car!"

"Noct can pay for a new one!" Gladio roared, and climbed through. Noct swore and created a wall between the front and back seats. "Gods fucking fuck, you fucking piece of fucking--"

"What he means is," Ignis shouted, "take that down and turn this van around!"

"No can do, Ignis!" Noct yelled, and spun the wheel, turning off towards the exit out of Insomnia. "We've got better things to do."

"Like what?" Gladio shouted.

"Like breaking into an imperial keep full of the fucking Scourge, apparently!" Noct slammed on the gas again, leaning on the horn. "So if you guys want out, get out now."


	26. Chapter 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooooooo I'm so darn stoked about writing future chapters that this one ended up being a bit hard to get through. Sorry, folks! At least there's more Prompto?

The van ran out of gas a few minutes out of Insomnia, puttering to a stop in the middle of the road with a wheeze of exhaust. Noct kept his hands on the wheel as the engine gave up the ghost, and Gladio wrenched the front door off the lock with an anguished wail from Prompto and a shriek of security alarms. Gladio stood there for a good half a minute, just glowering at Noct, until Prompto squeezed between them, pressed a button on the dashboard, and slowly slunk away. The alarm gave one last warbling beep, leaving Noct with nothing but the sound of Gladio's harsh breathing and the clack of sabertusks rooting around in the distance.

"The hell are we doing, Noct?" Gladio asked, and somewhere in the midst of the bone-deep exhaustion in his voice was the barest hint of his father's low, patient tone. "You owe us that much."

"We're getting Ravus to the Oracle," Noct said. 

There was a long silence. Ignis was hovering at Gladio's side, giving him frantic signals, and Prompto was looking between the three of them with growing bewilderment. Gladio just crossed his arms and snorted.

"Right," he said. "Then we're calling your dad."

"Called," Ignis said. "We called your father. Sorry, Noctis, but he lost you once already. We can't run the risk."

"And I can't risk my only friend--" Noct grimaced at the look on Ignis' face. "Sorry. But he was." He climbed out of the van, and when he tried to close the door after him, it bounced off the broken lock. Prompto flinched. 

"Sorry, Prompto," Noct said. "I'll pay for repairs."

"First, we'll have to find a suitable garage," Ignis said. "Which is... About a mile north of us."

"Please tell us we aren't pushing my van all the way," Prompto said, and Gladio gave Noct a meaningful look.

"Well, someone is."

Noct's shirt was soaked with sweat before he could even grab the bumper, sticking uncomfortably to his back as he and Gladio pushed the van down the street, their boots scraping on the asphalt. Prompto had pretty good upper body strength, but he kept getting distracted by Pryna, and Ignis climbed in and tried to work the gas, so for the most part, it was just Gladio and Noct, sweating and puffing and trying not to hold a quiet argument with their eyes. Heat rippled over the road, and even the red dust that bloomed from herds of monsters near the rocks seemed to hang in the air, too tired to come back down. Noct stopped to tie back his hair in a bun, and a grey four-door truck with a steel box strapped down with tarp slowed to a halt next to them, engine rumbling. 

"Hey, Gladio," Prompto said. "Stick out your leg."

"I got standards, Prompto," Gladio said, and Prompto grinned. His smile froze as the truck window slid down and Cor Leonis leaned over from the driver's side, glowering impressively.

"Get in," he said.

Noct looked down at his dust-caked clothes, then back to the ruined, broken van, and sighed. He climbed in the back with Gladio and Ignis, who both slumped in front of the air conditioning vents, eyes closed. Prompto hopped in the front seat with Pryna, who whined and rolled at his feet.

Ignis coughed.

"So," Cor said. "The prince of Tenebrae's in some kind of trouble."

"Yeah," Noct said. "I think the Scourge counts, don't you?"

They idled in the middle of the road, Cor drumming his hands on the wheel. "It's probably a trap," he said.

"Yeah, that, too," Noct said. Cor grunted. "I know I should've said something, but there's no way in hell Regis would've let me go--"

"That's true enough." Cor twisted around to look him in the eyes. "Noct, I know you're used to dangerous missions. I get that. But you aren't alone anymore. Sometimes you have to let other people do the work for you. Regis can't afford to lose you a second time."

"He won't," Noct said. 

"And he's not the only one doing this." Noct looked up at Prompto, who was twisting a cotton band around his wrist, staring down Cor with a nervous sort of defiance. "Ravus is all the family Luna has left. And maybe I understand what, um, Noctis is trying to say. You can't really forget your first friend."

Noct raised his eyebrows at Prompto, but he kept his gaze on Cor, tugging at his wristband. "I'll go to Luna on my own if I have to."

"And what do you two think?" Cor asked, glancing back at Ignis and Gladio.

"I think it's convenient that the Glaives are out of Insomnia right now," Ignis said. "I believe it's a trap, but it could be for more than just Noct."

"I'm sticking with Noct," Gladio said. "Right. With him. Every second of the fucking day."

"I don't care how many times you're gonna try and get me to apologize," Noct said.

"You nearly threw me into traffic!"

"Yeah? You're the one who jumped on the van!"

"And both of you are paying for it!" Prompto snapped. Noct and Gladio scowled at him, and he made an odd gesture with his hand, pointing from his eyes to theirs.

"Is this because of your mother?" Cor asked. Noct felt Ignis and Gladio's gazes slip away from him, deliberate and awkward, as silence spread through the crowded truck.

"I don't know what you mean," Noct said.

Cor cleared his throat. "Aulea. She was out on a goodwill mission, and she... Regis didn't tell you?" He tugged at his jacket collar. "She contracted the Scourge. Regis tried to... I drove them to Tenebrae. We didn't make it in time."

"But the reports said it was something else," Noct said. "Complications during surgery or something." He looked up at the grey fabric of the roof. "Regis said he tried blood magic, once."

Ignis hissed out a soft breath.

"Yes," Cor said, after a moment. "For a second there, I thought I'd lost them both."

Outside, the dust clouds drifted over the desert, twisting away in a warm wind from the sea.

"Let's get something to eat," Cor said. He turned over the engine, and the truck peeled away from Prompto's van. "I'll make a call to Regis, and we'll figure out where they're holding that friend of yours."

They stopped at a Crow's Nest for lunch, where Gladio, Cor, and Ignis stood out like parrots in a flock of sparrows, and spent a minute puzzling over the menu while Noct and Prompto immediately went for the fries. It was the only thing a Crow's Nest diner could get right more than once, and Noct knew better from years of stopping in for takeout before missions to order the fish. He and Prompto ended up sitting down first, sliding into a wide booth at the back of the diner.

"You've been to one of these before," Noct said, and Prompto smiled. 

"Yeah, there's one down the street from my parents' place," he said. "Kenny Crow's three credit burgers all the way, dude."

Noct tossed a few of his fries on Prompto's plate. "Sorry about flipping out back there."

"I'm with you, buddy," Prompto said. "Just go easy on the van next time, okay?" 

"You'll be happy to know it'll be repaired by the time we get home," Ignis said, sliding into the booth with a tray of fried fish. Prompto gave Noct a knowing look, and Noct hid a smile behind his hand. "Prompto, what exactly did Luna tell you?"

"She said not to worry," Prompto said. He squeezed close to the window as Gladio slid in next to him, followed by Cor. "Which is worrying, trust me. She says Gentiana--that's her other bff, Noct, she's kind of like a big scary ghost who shows up in the mirror when you're trying to pee and talks riddles at you--Gentiana tried to get to him, but there's something blocking her. Which is what she'd said about Noct, remember, so I think they're connected somehow."

"She said Tenebrae, right? He's somewhere in Tenebrae? On the border?" Noct watched Ignis slowly push his fish away with a plastic fork, picking around it for chips.

"Pretty much."

"Then I know where Ravus is," he said. "Should've guessed it from the start." 

He shoved a handful of fries in his mouth and spoke through it, much to the delight of Prompto and the well-bred disgust of half the table. "How'd you guys like to see where I grew up?"

 

\---

 

Before they left the diner, Noct pulled Cor aside and quietly asked if he could pass a message to Regis.

"You should call him yourself," Cor said, handing Noct the phone. Noct thumbed through it, hovering over the king's name. "Go on. Want me to stand with you?"

"I can make a call on my own, you know," Noct said, but Cor didn't budge. Noct retreated to the pinball machines, where he pressed himself to the corner and held his breath as the phone started to ring.

Regis picked up in two seconds. "Cor? Report."

"Hey, d--" Noct closed his eyes. "It's. Uh."

"Noctis." The relief in Regis' voice was painful. 

"Yeah." Noct ran a hand through his hair, undoing his bun. "I'm. I'm really sorry."

"I won't pretend this isn't taking a decade off my life, Noctis," Regis said.

"I can't leave Ravus behind."

"I know." Regis sighed loudly. "I'll send you reinforcements as soon as I'm able."

"Don't bother. There's something else you need to worry about." Noct dragged at his roots, then lowered his voice. "It's your captain, Dad."

He didn't miss the way Regis' breath hitched on the other end. "My captain?"

"I..." Noct looked back at Cor. _You aren't alone anymore._ "I saw him on the dock this morning..."

When Noct was done, Cor took the phone, which seemed to weld itself to his ear for the next hour. Noct climbed into the truck bed rather than listen to one half of a full-on international incident in the making, and Prompto joined him, bringing two glass bottles of lime-green soda. They cracked them open as the truck started, and Pryna propped her paws up on the side, barking at the passing trees.

"You ever been out of Insomnia?" Noct asked. Prompto shook his head.

"Always wanted to," he said. "Luna writes about Tenebrae like its the most beautiful place in the world."

"It can be," Noct said. "I've seen a little of it."

Prompto took a sip of his drink. "You remind me of Luna," he said. Noct jerked, spilling soda over his hand. "A little, anyways. You both look kind of... I don't know. Lost, sometimes."

Noct opened his mouth, but Prompto interrupted him before he could find the words. "I used to feel that way, too. I mean, it isn't the same. I'm not a prince or anything. But I think I can see it."

He pulled away the band covering his wrist, revealing a neat, uniform barcode in dark blue ink. "You ever see one of these before?" he asked.

Noct hesitated. He'd only visited the MT research facility once, when he was too young to know any better and thought Ardyn's warning was more of a test than the truth. He'd walked along the tubes while Verstael Besithia talked about failures, about _bad batches_ and _culling the herd,_ and had examined the barcodes on the half-formed clones, obscured by the green liquid of their holding containers. He'd never heard of any of them escaping. He hadn't even considered if they could live outside their pods.

"Yeah," Noct said. "Yeah, I think so."

"Luna told me what it meant when I was twelve," Prompto said. "She didn't mean to. Sometimes the visions Pryna shares go a little too long, or she gets distracted and sends me something Luna doesn't want me to see. So suddenly it all made sense. Why my parents had to fight to send me to public school. Why we kept getting checkups from people like Cor, why I always had to hide the barcode. I felt like the only person in the universe. I don't know what I would've done without Luna."

A flock of birds took off from a nearby marsh, squawking loudly. Their feathers were long and black, and they wheeled over the pale blue sky.

"I caught Ravus smoking in the keep when I was a kid," Noct said. "He used to give me flowers from Tenebrae. He said Luna had a penpal, someone she wanted to keep secret. She seemed to care about them, whoever they were."

Prompto smiled sheepishly into his drink and crossed his legs. Pryna bounded over to flop onto their feet, paws in the air, tail wagging furiously. Before them, the Disc slowly came into view, smoke rising from the jagged meteor at its heart.

"We'll find them," Prompto said, but there was something of a question in his voice as he looked to Noct. "They'll be okay."

"Yeah," Noct said. "They will, Prompto. I promise."


	27. Chapter 27

"Ships! Ships on the horizon!"

Nyx Ulric stood knee-deep in the cold waters of his home island of Avalon, a young boy clinging to his shoulders. The Cold Mountain was just as he remembered it, lush with green growth and teeming with waterfalls and hidden springs, but what had been a city of thousands was now a small village framed by alarm bells on fishing wire. The bells rang high over the roar of the waves, and Nyx forced himself to look up, far into the thick grey clouds where imperial drop-ships flew like beetles in the distance. Several of them were roped together, a massive creature slung between them, so heavy that it's body almost skimmed the swelling waves.

"It's a god," the boy on Nyx's back whispered. "They killed a god."

"No," Nyx said. He turned, trudging towards the boat that waited for them, already weighed down by the refugees crowding the deck. "No, kid, that's not a god."

Captain Drautos met Nyx on the boat. His own family was there, huddled together in a close circle. They eyed Drautos warily, as though they weren't sure what to make of him, but Drautos didn't seem to notice. He took the boy from Nyx and made a mark on a thick pad of paper chained to the railing.

"That's everyone but Crowe," he said. "Did you see her?"

"Fuck," Nyx said. "She was up in the square. I'll get her, sir."

"We don't have time," Drautos said.

Only a few miles from the archipelago, the great daemon stirred in its bonds, it's belly slicing through the water. Nyx caught his breath. Somewhere in the earth of the mountain before him lay the bones of his sister, his mother, the ghost of a young man who would never be fast enough to save them. Nyx turned back to Drautos and smiled, his heart thudding fast, his body thrumming with borrowed magic. 

"Don't worry, sir," he said. "I'll find a way."

 

\---

 

In the imperial keep on the border of Tenebrae and Niflheim, where shadows pulsed in unlit hallways and bodies lay in misshapen heaps on the floor, Ravus Nox Fleuret braced his feet on the door and prayed.

He wasn't normally a man for prayer, not since his mother fell smoldering in the wreckage of her favorite garden, Ravus' sword gone slack in his hand. He hadn't prayed on those first cold nights in the imperial barracks, when whispers followed him down the halls, when he lifted a young prince to his shoulder and promised himself that this time, this time he would get it right. He hadn't prayed when Ardyn Izunia had frozen _time_ in the stairwell, the world gone cold and dim at the edges, to whisper all the things that would come to pass for the Oracle's line. He hadn't prayed when the royal forest burned down, or when Noctis' eyes went hard, when the death toll mounted, when his own uselessness burned at him like a brand on his neck.

He pressed a hand to his arm, where the sickly green-brown mark of the Scourge showed through his skin, and felt something thick shift around muscle and bone. He laughed shortly, tilting his head back to the side of the cot, and closed his eyes.

"Etro," he whispered. "Not yet. Don't take me yet."

Something thumped against the door. There was a hissing sound, the screech of a throat unused to human speech, and a grey appendage snaked through the bottom of the door. Ravus stamped at it, and heard a wail on the other side, the uncertain scramble of something stumbling off into the dark.

Then he squared his shoulders against the cot and wished, not for the first time, that when they'd come for him at last, he'd at least remembered to steal a goddamn knife.

 

\---

 

"Do you know what the mad kings of Solheim used to call us?"

Noct sat on a low wooden dresser in a poorly-built shack, watching a woman braid a young Ardyn's hair. Ardyn couldn't have been more than five, but his hair was already wild, and his mother pinned it up in an elaborate twist, fitting in small red blossoms every few inches.

"Dirt-eaters," she said. Ardyn made a face, and the woman laughed. "That's what witches are. My great-great-great-great-great--" she poked Ardyn in the side with each word, making him giggle and shriek. "Great! Grandmother! Used to go out in the woods and eat the clay of the haven, where the magic stones were. Every night, she ate the earth, and every morning, she mixed her blood into it, until she was so full of power that the wicked old kings tried to hunt her down." Her voice took on a low, mocking tone. "No! No one's allowed to have _our_ magic!"

"Mother, please." A dark-haired boy stopped at the door, holding a scroll under his arm. "They _killed_ the old kings. It doesn't matter anymore."

"Somnus!" Ardyn clambered down off the bed, and Somnus sidestepped him as he ran in for a hug. "Somnus! Somnus, I'm learning magic now! We can go to school together!"

Somnus gave his mother a horrified look. " _Mother._ "

"Be kind," she said, as Ardyn bounced on his heels, watching Somnus with an earnest, soulful look. "He has more magic in his pinkie than most will have in their whole lives. He'll need your guidance, Somnus."

Somnus rolled his eyes. "Okay, Ardyn. Let's practice meditation. For all the good it'll do you."

"Yes!" Ardyn jumped in place, and hopped after Somnus, flowers falling at his feet. "Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!"

The woman sighed, smiling a little to herself, and bent to pick up her discarded hairpins. She tucked them away in a leather bag, then looked directly at Noctis.

"Show yourself," she said. Noct flinched. He'd never been noticed in any of his dreams before. Ardyn's mother tapped her nose. "Do you think I couldn't sense a disturbance of magic with my boys in the room? Go on!" She clapped her hands in Noct's face, and he fell off the dresser. Her eyes followed him, even if she didn't quite meet his face, and she picked up a broom from the corner, holding it like a club. Noct raised a hand and squinted his eyes shut.

"Woah, dude, easy!"

Noct opened his eyes again. He was in a tent--The tent Cor and Gladio had set up the night before, when they hadn't made it to the closest gas station in time--and sunlight was breaking through a gap in the tent door, shining on Prompto's upturned face. Prompto grinned and patted Noct's hand down, then rolled to sit up. Ignis and Gladio's sleeping bags were already gone, and Noct could hear Pryna snuffling near the fire. He got up and crawled out of the tent, wincing in the early morning sunlight.

"Morning," Ignis said. He shoved a plate of bacon at Noct, who took it muzzily. "How do you feel about trains?"

"Like... emotionally?"

Cor huffed a laugh. "We're taking one through Tenebrae," he said. "Fastest way to get to the keep. They'll even load the truck for us."

"Oh. Huh." Noct ate with his hands, picking at slices of bacon, and Ignis wordlessly handed over a napkin. Pryna took position next to him, attempting to look as starving as possible, and Cor downed half a mug of coffee in one go, blinking dully into the landscape. The Disc was a small pit of rocks on the horizon now, sparkling in the sun, and the dark stone of the north was already peeking up through the grass. Prompto whipped out a camera the moment he was awake enough to see it, crouching down to get a better angle.

Ignis tilted his head. "More photos to send to Luna?" he asked.

"Maybe," Prompto said. His ears were beacons of red against his wild blond hair. "I checked with Pryna. She's in Tenebrae, in the manor. They're keeping her locked in her room."

"We'll find a way to get her out," Noct said. "I'm pretty used to fighting MTs..." He trailed off, suddenly all too aware of Prompto in the grass, peering into his camera lens. Prompto looked over his shoulder and shrugged.

"It's cool," he said. 

They packed quickly, storing the camping gear in the back of the truck while Cor gave Regis another update. This time, Ignis joined Noct and Prompto in the back, where he pulled out his phone and showed them different shots of Insomnia.

"After we ran into you in our teens," Ignis said, "I started compiling a list of places I thought you might want to visit. There's the arcade--"

"Oh, dude, I love that one," Prompto said. "I got kicked out for trying to bring Pryna in."

"And the upper park, where they have the wild bird rescue. There's a butterfly pavilion just out of frame..."

Noct leaned against rolled-up tents while Ignis went on, mapping out the city piece by piece. He felt like he needed another lifetime just to see it all, let alone visit, but it was nice to hear Ignis and Prompto chatter away, offering recommendations and warnings, treating it like a small tour of Insomnia.

"Did Niflheim have anything like this?" Prompto asked, after a while.

"I don't know," Noct said. "I didn't get out much."

"Like, at all?"

Noct shrugged, and Prompto frowned slightly. "I can see why. Half the people in Insomnia seem to recognize me on the spot. I bet even the emperor wouldn't be able to keep it a secret for long."

"Look sharp, boys!" Cor shouted, and Noct sat up as a long, glass-domed building slid into view. The trains were already there, smoke hanging above the platform, and people milled around the ticket stands in loose groups, clutching their suitcases and bags in white-knuckled grips.

"It's all over," one of them said, as Noct and Ignis passed them by. "Three districts already, and the emperor's said nothing."

"Had to leave my uncle behind," a man said. "He had it. I could see the spots. They made me send him to quarantine."

"That doesn't sound promising," Ignis whispered. They waited for Cor to get their tickets, and watched the groups of refugees hover from place to place, whispering and crying, holding their papers to their chests. 

"They're from Niflheim," Noct said, as they climbed into the almost empty train to the border. "Look at their clothes. Way too heavy for this kind of weather."

"The hell's going on in Niflheim?" Gladio asked. Noct bit his cheek at the sight of a small child sitting alone with a plastic bag at his side, staring forlornly at the crowded platform.

"We should do something," he said. "I'm a prince now, right? I should be able to do something."

"People won't be happy to have Nif refugees entering the city," Gladio said.

"They can at least set up in Leide," Noct said. "We can build houses for them. Set up daemon-warding lights. Run wires underground from the city."

"It's a thought," Ignis said. "If you want to follow through, we can draft an emergency bill to bring to the council. It _is_ within your right."

Noct sat down in a booth next to Cor, who waited a moment, holding out a hand, then swung an arm around his shoulders. Noct let the weight ground him as the train trembled and shook, and looked to the others.

"Actually," he said, "before any of us talk about a bill, I want to know more about the council. Who they are, what they support. Anything and everything you know." 

Ignis' eyes gleamed, and he leaned back, steepling his fingers. "Very well. If you insist."

They only needed an hour to get through Tenebrae. Tenebrae was narrow, a bridge between nations, and the train lines cut straight through it, veering slightly left to avoid the corpse of the Glacian on the border of Niflheim. They stopped just as frost started to appear on the clover outside, and Noct wobbled as he got to his feet, the world tilting below him. 

"We're close," he said. "The keep's to the West of here."

They drove down a dirt road over a rolling hillside of clover and heather, the truck jostling with every stone and pothole they passed. Noct stayed in the front seat this time, trying to guide them with his own hazy memory, and when they saw the squat, steel walls of the keep at last, he had to stop for a minute. It was smaller than he remembered, hardly a proper keep at all, and he wondered at how, as a child, he'd barely managed to run a lap around it in less than half an hour. They parked behind a copse of trees, but they didn't have to bother--There were no sentries at the walls or towers, no lights on the gate. 

"A trap, then," Ignis said.

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure," Noct said. "I can get in, though. If I warp over the wall, I can get the gate open, and we can scope the place. Except Prompto. Prompto, you guard the truck."

"Already on it," Prompto said. 

"I'll stay with Prompto," Ignis said, and Cor nodded shortly.

"And I'll help Gladio climb the wall," he said. "Don't want you on your own if you can't open the door, Noct."

Noct grimaced, but let it slide. They approached the keep from the back, staying low to the ground, and when they reached the first rusted gate, all Gladio had to do was peel a piece of it back to let them through. Noct looked up at the steel inner gate and took a breath.

"Okay," he said. "I'll see you guys inside."

Then he summoned a sword, threw it as high as he could, and warped to meet it.

He landed on an empty stretch of concrete. There were none of the mechs he remembered, no maintenance tools lying around, no lifts or trucks or MT containment units. The lot was bare, and the door to the inner rooms of the keep was jammed shut from the outside.

Between Noct pushing on one side and Gladio dragging at the bottom from the other, they managed to get the gate open enough for Gladio and Cor to slip through. Gladio stepped ahead of Noct, summoning a shield, and kept himself before him at all times, a shadow over his eyes.

"Be ready," Cor said, when they reached the door. He lay a hand on the bar, and the door rattled. "Alright. Go."

He wrenched the bar free, and the door slammed open. A great creature scuttled out, a spider daemon with the upper body of a woman, hissing and shrieking as her skin burned in the light of the sun. She lunged at Gladio, who swung a sword in an arc into her belly, and Cor darted in to slice off the daemon's legs. They fell back as the daemon shuddered and bled into the concrete, and Noct pushed on ahead, into the dark.

Someone had broken all the lights of the inner keep, but Noct didn't need them. His magic was light enough, lightning wrapping around his sword as he jammed it into the throat of a daemon, and crackling along the length long after he'd ended the spell. Gladio stayed close even with the shocks of electricity that jumped between them, and they fought their way through the keep, trying not to notice the bodies that lay in pieces in empty rooms and abandoned hallways. 

"That was my bedroom," Noct said, jerking a head to the open door of his and Ardyn's rooms. It was strange to see it after spending weeks in a bedroom big enough for a small house. The room was barely a closet, really, windowless and dull, and Noct felt his chest ache a little as they passed. No wonder he'd spent so much time in Ardyn's room those first few months.

"He kept you there?" Gladio's voice was a growl, heavy and low, and Noct found that he had nothing to say for it.

"Let's just get to Ravus," he said. "If he's alive."

They opened every door they found, broke every window to bring in the sunlight, but still the daemons kept coming. Finally, they reached the infirmary, where an imp scratched at a closed door, hissing and drooling against the wall. Noct ran it through, and heard a sharp breath on the other side, and the thud of something falling over.

"Ravus?" he asked. He pulled the door open.

Ravus lay on the ground of the small infirmary exam room, drenched in sweat. His skin was mottled with the Scourge, which seemed to bloom and spread by the second, and his eyes were wide and unfocused. Noct knelt at his side, a hand on his chest, and felt something move under his fingers.

"Ravus," he said. "Ravus, it's Noct. I'm gonna take you to Luna."

Ravus only tilted his head back, black veins standing out against his skin.

"It's too late," Cor said. "Noct. I'm sorry, it's--"

"No," Noct said. He bent over Ravus, laying both hands over his heart. No, it wasn't too late. It couldn't be. Noct closed his eyes, seeking out the warmth at the core of his power. It was there, waiting for him, muted by the elemental magic that Noct knew so well, and he tugged at it, wrapping a cord of it through the gaps. It burned through his other magic as it rose, eating away at the blue light of Noct's power, and fell into Noct's hands with the strength of a river crashing over the rocks of a gully. Noct pushed, and the light fell into Ravus, eating away at the Scourge. The Scourge tried to cling to it, tried to crawl up Noct's magic and into his own body, but Noct pushed it down, burning the thin tendrils that tried to hook into him. He felt the lump in Ravus' heart dissipate, and spread his awareness to the blackness in his arms, the spots of Scourge in his skin. Ravus was breathing louder, now, and sweat dripped from Noct's nose to his face, making him twist and try to blink his gaze into focus.

"Luna?" he whispered. His voice was a hoarse croak. Noct sucked in a gasp of air and pushed his magic into Ravus' arm. "Mother?"

"No, it's--" Noct started, but Ravus' eyes were clouded, tears mingling with the sweat of his fever. His chest constricted, and his body shook in a sob, harsh and sharp and terrible.

"It's gonna be okay, Ravus," Noct whispered. His mouth was dry--his own heartbeat felt like a hammer in his chest. "You're gonna be fine."

Ravus only wept, shaking under his touch, as Noct called more power through the rope at his core, masking his awareness of Cor, of Gladio, of the strange blue distance that seemed to take up the room around him. It wasn't until he heard footsteps, oddly dry and clear through the roaring in his ears, that he knew something was wrong.

A hand gripped the back of his collar, and Noct was thrown back, hitting the wall with a thump that punched the wind out of him. He sank to his knees, and heard the crack of a palm before he felt the sting of pain on his cheek, the taste of blood on his tongue.

"What have you done?" Ardyn cried. Noct looked up, only for Ardyn's hand to swing down again. Noct forced himself back to his knees, but he couldn't grasp the magic to bring up a shield. He just stared up at Ardyn's ruined face, the Scourge trickling from his eyes and lips, and grabbed the wall for balance.

"Who taught you?" Ardyn snarled. He grabbed Noct by the collar and dragged him to his feet. "Shiva? Is this their plan? To build another healer king? How much have you taken in already?"

"You're not making any sense," Noct said. He tried to push away, but Ardyn held him fast, lifting him off his toes. Gladio and Cor were in the doorway, frozen in place, but when Noct looked into the face of the man he'd called his father, he saw fear in Ardyn's eyes.

"I thought you wanted this," Noct said. 

"You weren't supposed to--This was meant to be a _lesson,_ " Ardyn said. He dropped Noct to the floor. "A sign of what's to come, if you don't wear the ring."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Noct asked. Ardyn's eyes narrowed.

"Of course," he said. "Drautos didn't tell you."

"Tell me what?"

"He was _supposed_ to hand you the ring," Ardyn said. "Are you telling me--"

"Sorry, Dad," Noct said. He inched back towards Ravus. "I guess you misjudged him."

Ardyn took a step forward. "No," he said. "I misjudged you. Well, I won't do it again. If the gods want to change their plans, so can I. They may have their chosen king, damn them, when I've wrung the--"

"Oh, dear."

Noct blinked. The woman who stepped through the wall behind Ravus was dressed in white, not black, and her hair was braided over her shoulders, but Noct recognized her smile, her gait, and the rounded shape of her face. Shiva stepped around Ravus, her dress brushing his face, and opened her bright green eyes. A chill fell over the room, ice floating in the air like shards of glass, and she placed a hand on Noct's shoulder.

"You've held me back long enough, little king," she said to Ardyn.

"Ah," Ardyn said. "I should have known you'd be behind this. Why, Shiva, you haven't aged a day."

Shiva smiled gently and lay a finger on her lips. She pressed it to Ardyn's, and ice crackled over his skin, encasing him like a statue in the Citadel garden. She turned to Noct.

"You have minutes at best," she said. "Go to the Oracle. Bring her brother to her." As she vanished, she sucked in the blue distance with her, leaving Noct standing in the middle of the room with a stunned Gladio and Cor, a statue of ice, and a panting, trembling Ravus. 

"The fuck--" Gladio said. Noct shook his head and stumbled over to Ravus.

"No time," he said, hauling Ravus into his arms. "We've only got a few minutes. Call Ignis and Prompto, we need to get him out of here."

Gladio gaped, but Cor ducked through the door, taking Ravus' other arm. They staggered out of the room together, Ravus' feet dragging on the floor, and Noct tried not to look back at Ardyn as they left, his face frozen in a smile, his hand outstretched for a mocking bow.


	28. Chapter 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for some talk of abuse in this chapter.

A swell of voices jostled Nyx awake. He opened his eyes to a wall of bodies, all shifting and rustling, hands clenched, heads twisting like startled birds. For a minute, he was back at the fall of Galahd, searching for his mother and sister in the crowd. The truth was there, hidden away in a memory of gunfire and a dizzying fall from the second floor of the family home, but there was a part of him that hoped it had been nothing more than a vivid nightmare, that one of the women before him would turn and smile, her eyes warm, the beads in her hair shining in the morning sun. The king had been with him, back then, leaning on the railing, and he'd given Nyx a long, sober look, less a king than a man, worn to the bone and dusted with ash.

It wasn't until Nyx found a home in Insomnia, crashing on Captain Titus Drautos' floor, that he recognized the look in King Regis' eyes. It was the same one he saw in his own, tired and old, a hole in the sky seeking out the light.

"He lost his son a few years ago," Drautos had said, when Nyx thought to ask. Nyx was one of a handful of teenagers sleeping on Drautos' couch and floor, but as one of the oldest, Nyx found he was able to coax more out of Drautos than the others. "It's hardened him. It hardens all of us. You were in the resistance, weren't you? You know what it's like."

"Maybe," Nyx said. He fumbled with his collar, so stiff in the heat of the inner city, and Drautos laid a hand on his back.

"I thought we could do it," Nyx whispered. "I thought there were enough of us."

"That's the first illusion to go," Drautos said, and for a moment, his face was still and implacable as stone. "Nothing will ever be enough."

Eleven years later, Nyx watched the last refugees of Galahd jostle each other on the deck, voices rising as the beat was tied to the dock of Galdin Quay.

"Hey. Action hero." Nyx grunted as Crowe kicked his side. "Stop daydreaming. We're going home."

Nyx looked up. Crowe's mouth was twisted in a wry smile, and her cape was gone, probably lost forever in the village they left behind. She showed no sign of exhaustion, never mind that Nyx had found her carrying a full-grown woman on her back in the middle of an empty village, never mind that they had to swim most of the way to the nearest boat, that the first bloom of fire in the trees lit the sky as they were hauled aboard. Her hair was almost dry, and she had a new beaded necklace dangling below the red gem of her mage uniform. 

"Lib's waiting with the car," she said. "If you want someone to treat you gentle."

"Thanks," Nyx said, pushing himself to his feet. "Good to know you're as tender-hearted as ever, Crowe."

"I'm just better at hiding it. Come on, Nyx. Time to piss off every Lucian in Insomnia."

They pushed through the crowd together, their uniforms doing more to ease their way than Crowe's expert elbowing ever could, and found Libertus on the dock, speaking in a low voice to another Glaive. Libertus grinned wide at their approach and drew Crowe into a crushing embrace. 

"You little shit," he said. "You scared the hell out of me."

Crowe groaned and wriggled free, shoving a hand in Libertus' face, and Nyx pulled a despairing look.

"What?" he said. "No hug for the man who found her?"

"You're as bad as she is," Libertus said. "So don't you start."

The three of them were assigned to take the first wave of refugees to Insomnia, hanging on the outside of the vans waiting by the Quay and searching the skies for incoming drop-ships. The gates to Insomnia were held open for them, a line of soldiers waiting on either side, and when the last van entered, Nyx dropped down as Captain Drautos strode out to the center of the line. The king was there, his shield at his back, holding a gold-tipped cane in one white-knuckled hand. Nyx saw Clarus Amicitia's shoulders straighten as Drautos stopped before the king.

"It's good to see you well, old friend," the king said. Drautos' gaze didn't flicker.

"I could say that it was an honor to serve," Drautos said.

"You could," the king said. "But I must say I'd rather you didn't."

Libertus grabbed Nyx's shoulder, and Drautos nodded slowly, taking the king's hand in his. There was a pulse of magic, a scent of ozone in the air, and Drautos staggered, pulling free. It was like a great floodlight turning off, a circuit shorting out. The king looked past Drautos, his expression gone vague, then turned from him as though he were no more than a ghost. Drautos looked back, and a woman Nyx recognized as his older sister stepped down from one of the vans. She took a step forward, but Drautos turned his back to her, walking slowly towards the line of Crownsguard. They parted before him, then closed, a fist clenching, and Drautos walked steadily on into the streets, shedding his Kingsglaive hood in the gutter.

"Nyx Ulric."

Nyx stared at the hood. The silver still shone, tucked in the folds of black cloth like the twisted branches of a dying tree.

"Acting-Captain Nyx Ulric."

Nyx looked up. The king stood before him, a statue in gold and black, magic radiating from his hands in waves. Nyx sank to a knee, and his eyes were level with the ring on the king's finger, which glowed with a faint blue light. He felt drawn to it, something in his own magic leaning towards it, a hunger that burned in his veins.

"I'm afraid I have a favor I must ask of you," the king said, and Nyx reluctantly tore his gaze away. "It concerns my son."

 

\---

 

Gladio refused to touch Ravus. It made sense, Noct supposed, as he dragged Ravus into the bed of the truck. The Scourge was a rarity behind the wall, and it wasn't like anyone really knew how it spread, but Noct had handled enough of it when he was young, wiping trails of it off Ardyn's cheeks in a panic, that he knew it probably didn't spread through touch alone. He sat next to Ravus, a hand on his chest, and examined the dark smudges just under his skin. 

"We need the Oracle," Noct said. "Tell me Prompto knows where she is."

"She may already be on the road," Cor said. He crouched next to Noct, watching the keep as Ignis stamped on the gas, peeling away from the gate. "Noct. Your face."

"How the hell'd he even get there?" Gladio asked. "It was like the room... moved, suddenly, and he was just. There. No warning."

"Part of what he is, I guess," Noct said. He felt for his magic. It was easier to reach, now, unhindered by the fraying edges of the elements. He dragged it through and prodded at the Scourge in Ravus' shoulder. 

"And your face?" Cor asked.

Noct shrugged. "He wasn't happy," he said. "Seemed to think I was supposed to have Regis' ring."

Cor was silent at that. The Scourge tried to stick to Noct's magic as he pushed through it, climbing up the rope of his power, and Noct had to wrench away, cutting off all contact. Ravus' skin was glowing faintly, and the bruised look of his shoulder had lessened, but it still wasn't enough.

"Ravus." Noct tapped Ravus' cheek, and his eyelids fluttered. "Ravus, it's me. Noct."

Ravus squinted up at him. "Noct? Good gods, Luna said you were..." He lifted a hand. "Haven't seen you in..."

"It been a while," Noct said. "I've been in Lucis the past few weeks. Turns out we have more in common than I thought."

Ravus licked his lips. "They found you?"

"Something like that."

Ravus closed his eyes again. "At least one of us gets to escape," he breathed.

"Hey." Noct shoved at his shoulder. "We both do. What do you think this is? We're taking you to the Oracle. She'll heal you."

"Thought she already..." Ravus blinked. "There was a light. I thought."

"You aren't out of the woods yet," Noct said. Behind them, the keep disappeared in the clover, nothing but a dark smudge in the distance. "But we'll get you there."

The sun was setting by the time they crossed the train tracks, but they doubted that the guards at the platform entrance would let them carry a man with the Scourge through the front gates, and Prompto said that Luna was further east, closer to the manor. So they parked near a haven, and Noct helped Ravus hobble onto the runes, which made him hiss in pain. 

"I don't understand," Ravus said, as the others started setting up camp around them. Gladio watched them out of the corner of his eye, wary and tense, and Ignis set a smaller tent up closer to the fire, where the runes burned brightest. "You're saying you healed me?"

"Not completely," Noct said. "Not well enough."

"Can you show me?" Ravus asked. Cor glanced at them, then, brows knit tight, but Noct just called on his power, bringing it to his hands. It was easier still, this time, weaving its way through Ravus' body, eating away at the Scourge as the Scourge tried to eat away at _it,_ like fire lapping at a puddle of oil. Ravus gasped and grabbed Noct by the shoulders, hunching over him, and finally pushed away. 

"Enough," he said. "Gods, it's like ice."

"Is that what Lunafreya's magic's like?" Noct asked, wiping sweat from his eyes.

"Hardly," Ravus said. "I'm told that it's instantaneous. Painless. She's a conduit for the gods, Noctis. You feel more like a bloody hammer pounding at my insides."

"Wow, okay," Noct said. "You're welcome, I guess."

Ravus' lips quirked in a familiar smile, and Noct smiled back. 

"I thought you were lost," Ravus said, after a while. "I'm glad to see I was wrong."

"Yeah, and I thought you were a kidnapper," Noct said. "Funny how that works out, huh?"

Ignis somehow managed to pull off a miracle with a camp stove and a little rice, and they all sat in a loose circle, everyone but Noct keeping a wide berth around Ravus. Noct ate three servings, suddenly ravenous, but Ravus just picked at his own meal.

"So, uh." Prompto cleared his throat. "Your face is kind of bruised, Noct. You get hit by a daemon back there?"

Noct touched his cheek. "Roughly speaking?"

Cor shifted uncomfortably, and Gladio frowned, watching him from across the fire.

"Ardyn never touched me," Noct said, into the silence. "I swear."

"I beg to differ," Ravus murmured, and Noct glared at him. 

"Training doesn't count," Noct said. "I told you that before."

"People don't use naked blades in _training,_ " Ravus said. "When I was young, we used padded staves--"

"You were a prince!" Noct said. "Of course no one would want to hurt _you._ " The circle around the fire was suddenly deathly still. Noct's face flushed with heat, and he rose. "Gods, I'm that sick of this. You can't learn anything if your opponent doesn't fight you like they mean it. He might've been... I'm not saying he was... You know what." Noct set his plate down and stalked off, heading for the glowing light of a stack of frost stones at the edge of the haven. "You guys can feel sorry for me all you want. I'm gonna, I don't know. I'm--" he looked at Cor. "Can I have your phone?"

Cor quietly handed Noct his cell, and Noct stormed off down the side of the haven.

"Good show, everyone," he heard Ignis say softly as he left. Noct let out a frustrated groan and slid down the side of the haven. 

The stones were comfortably cool at his back, casting a dim light over his legs, as Noct scrolled through Cor's phone. He sighed and put it away, then jumped at the sound of footsteps crunching over the stone behind him.

"It's just me," Cor said, and Noct closed his eyes as Cor sat next to him, a shoulder brushing Noct's. "I want to see how you're doing."

"Yeah, well." Noct scuffed his heels. "Pretty obvious, isn't it."

Cor scraped at a hint of stubble near his jaw. "You know, you can always talk to Regis about it. He might be best equipped."

"For what? Pity?"

Cor's smile was almost sad. "Yeah, he hated pity, too. Now, I'm only saying this because it might as well be public record, but... Regis' father thought he was too emotional to be king, you know. Tried to beat it out of him, I guess, and when that didn't work, Mors remarried. Regis got drunk during the wedding, and, mm. It was in the newspapers the next morning. King of Lucis strikes his own son in front of all the journalists in Insomnia." Cor drummed his hands on his knees. "Clarus laid hands on him. On Mors. I thought he was going to be executed." 

"What'd you do?" Noct asked.

"Tracked him down, afterwards. Brought him to Weskham. Told him Mors was probably going to die soon anyways, and Regis laughed so hard I thought he'd be sick." Cor sighed. "He wanted to spare you that, Noct. He wanted to do it right this time around."

"And Ardyn got me instead," Noct said. 

"But we got you back." Cor draped an arm over his knees. "And look at you. Coming up with plans for Galahd. Advocating for refugees. Risking everything for Ravus-- _healing_ Ravus, when that hasn't been done since the founder king--"

"Since Ardyn," Noct said, thinking of the fear in Ardyn's eyes.

"You're better than him. And I'm proud of you. _Regis_ is proud of you." He stood. "Call Regis. It'll do you good."

Noct took a deep breath. "Fuck, Cor," he said. Cor laughed.

"You'll be fine," he said. "I'll talk to the boys."

He disappeared around the edge of the stones, and Noct pulled the phone out, scrolling to Regis' number. Around him, crickets sang in the brush, and Pryna was pacing at his back, unwilling to cross the border of the haven. Noct pressed the call button and waited, staring up at the stars.

"Cor? Noctis?"

"Second one," Noct said. "I have a question." Regis waited, and Noct held his breath, trying to gather his thoughts. "What--What are you doing right now?"

"Reading," Regis said. "It's one of Aulea's favorites. Swashbucklers, horses, sword fights on rope bridges, pages and pages of description... I rather suspect the author was paid by the word."

"Huh," Noct said. He twisted his hands together, holding the phone up with his shoulder. Seconds dragged by, punctuated by the snap of the fire.

"Would you like me to read an excerpt?" Regis asked.

"Sure," Noct said. "Sure, yeah."

There was the sound of pages shuffling, and Regis cleared his throat. "Being an account of Balthier, sky pirate of Ivalice..."

Noct settled back against the stones, closing his eyes to the sound of Regis' voice. He wasn't sure exactly when or how he drifted off--He was only aware of Gladio picking the phone up off the ground, and an odd sense of weightlessness, the warmth of a dying fire at his side. Then there was darkness and a night without dreams, while above him the stars wheeled and the moon drifted full over the haven, bathing him in light.


	29. Chapter 29

The back roads of Tenebrae weren't built for trucks. They were formed by the slow, among trek of caravans and chocobos, by boots trudging through thick clover. The truck felt like an aberration on the narrow lane that wound through thin, four foot saplings, which stood against the burned-out stumps and rotting logs of what had once been the royal forest. Ravus stared out dispassionately as the truck jumped over stones and pits in the road, but Noct, the only one who ventured close enough to tell, could see the way his jaw clenched and his fingers went tight on his knee.

"It's looking better," Noct said.

"You never saw it in the first place," Ravus said, and closed his eyes. "My apologies."

Noct called to his armiger. It came to him slowly, as though the magic itself were _reluctant,_ but after a few seconds, a packet of cigarettes fell into his hand. Ravus stared at it in shock, and Noct shrugged.

"Stole it from you when I was eleven," he said. "Thought it'd help you quit."

"Self-destruction isn't exactly an easy habit to break," Ravus said, and pulled out a cigarette. Instinctively, he held it out for Noct to light. Noct snapped his fingers.

The wind whistled around them, rushing through the fragile leaves of the new forest. Noct snapped his fingers again.

"Perhaps you're tired," Ravus said, but Noct was already sinking into his magic. The elemental well that he'd drawn on all his life was still... There, in a way. But there were only scraps of it, patches, like holes in the sky. The core of Noct's magic drifted around them, pushing them further apart like so much flotsam, and Noct fell back to awareness with the thinnest strand of fire in his fingers, just enough to make the end of Ravus' cigarette glow a dull orange.

"I think something's wrong," Noct said. Ravus took a drag and looked at him curiously, and Noct's gaze slid past him, over the tops of the endless stretch of trees. A woman stood in the distance, her dark hair blowing in the breeze, eyes wide open.

"Shiva," Noct said, and she was gone. Ravus craned to follow Noct's gaze, found nothing, and frowned.

Noct turned, bracing a hand on the top of the truck. Ravus grabbed his pants as he stood, and Noct heard Gladio curse behind him, but he scanned the horizon instead, squinting into the trees.

There. The goddess, sitting on a stump.

There. Walking between saplings.

There. Bending to pluck at a piece of clover.

There. In the middle of the road, palms up, eyes to the sky.

"Stop," Noct said. He slammed his hand on the roof of the truck. "Stop! Stop the truck! There's someone in the road!"

"The hell?" Prompto shouted, and the truck veered as Cor slammed on the brakes. Gladio wrapped an arm around Noct's waist, only just stopping him from falling over Ravus' legs and into the ditch, and Noct wrenched a knife out of his armiger. He threw it into the clover, building the magic around himself like a cloak, and jerked in Gladio's grip.

"The fuck?" he whispered.

"What was that?" Gladio asked. Noct tried to phase out of his hold. Light burst around him, but he stayed put, Gladio's hand at his side, watching as Pryna and Ignis fell out of the passenger's seat.

"Did you _mean_ to throw your knife away?" Ravus asked. He was half standing himself, staring at the empty lane. Heat rushed to Noct's cheeks, and he pushed Gladio's arm out of the way, clambering over the side of the truck.

"Yeah," he said, voice dripping sarcasm. "It's a new move I'm working on."

"Oh, pardon me."

"I swear," Gladio said, jumping down after Noct. "Your drawls feed off each other sometimes."

"Like an endless nobility loop," Prompto said, and fell into a terrible impression of Noct's accent. "Ohh, euuhhh, I do declaaaare--Ow!" He grinned as Noct slapped the back of his head, and responded by smacking Noct on the ass. Noct stared at him blankly. "What?"

"Gentlemen," Ignis said.

"Oh man, even Specs is doing it."

"Where's this person in the road?" Cor asked, giving Prompto a stern look. Prompto sidestepped away from Noct, hands behind his back. "I didn't see anyone. Was it Ardyn?"

"No," Noct said. "Someone else. She's... Kind of a goddess? Look, she has dark hair, a white shawl--"

"Black lace on her neck?" Prompto asked. When the others looked his way, he raised a shoulder helplessly. "Sounds like Gentiana. Luna's spirit messenger, you know? She used to show up in my apartment. Seriously creepy. I mean, cool," he said, looking around nervously. "Definitely cool, don't get me wrong."

"Then Luna may be close?" Ignis said. "If she wanted us to stop... Where did you see her, Noct?"

Noct walked out into the middle of the lane, which had grass growing in a long stripe down the center, thick and lush. He started off towards the spot where Shiva had been, only for Pryna to start barking madly, rushing past him with her tail whipping like a banner. Noct took off after her, and her excitable barks were echoed by another set of barking, then howling, birds rising from the trees around them in a disgruntled cloud of feathers. 

A grey and white dog raced out of the trees and collided with Pryna, nuzzling her and trying to shove his paw in her face. She danced and licked him back, then barked again as a young woman walked out of the trees, holding a trident in her right hand.

The first thought Noct had, upon seeing Lunafreya Nox Fleuret step into the open, was that his visions were starting to bleed into his waking life. Another dream, perhaps, one from those old stories of kings and queens at the start of Lucis, a memory drawn from a goddess. She wore a long blue robe over a ratty, shredded white dress, and even though the robe was stained nearly a foot with mud and rolled awkwardly to her sleeves, she carried herself with the sort of effortless grace that Noct had only seen in Ravus, those rare times when Ravus wasn't hunched with nervous energy. She had his chin, too, and her light blonde hair was tied in a braided crown, wisps of it curling around her ears. She leaned on the trident, her left leg buckling as she climbed up the ditch, and held out a hand to Pryna.

"Luna!"

Lunafreya looked up as Prompto staggered into the road, pushing past Noct. He raced over to her, faster than he'd run even when Noct was there to drag him, and Luna covered her mouth with both hands as he heaved her into his arms. The trident fell with a clatter, and Prompto lifted her off the lane, her fingers still over her mouth, bare feet dangling a few inches off the ground.

"Prompto!" she cried, and looked to the others, eyes wide. "Prince Noctis? _Ravus?_ "

Noct turned as Ravus fell out of the truck. He was doing better since the day before, but his joints were still stiff, and he had to hang onto the side of the truck for balance. Prompto set Luna down, and she reached for her trident, carefully keeping her left foot off the ground.

"Hold on," Noct said, pointing to Ravus. He jogged over to Luna, Gladio and Ignis at his heels, considered bowing, realized it was probably too late, and dropped to a knee. Luna opened her mouth to protest, but Noct just shook his head.

"I think I can fix that," he said, gesturing to her foot. Luna smiled, and Noct could see why Prompto and Ravus spoke of her with just a hint of reverence, sometimes. She looked at him as though they were already old friends, as though she knew all the worst parts of him and still found him worthy. He swallowed past a lump in his throat and lay a hand on her ankle.

This was easier than healing Ravus. His power flowed through him smoothly, knitting together fractured bone, easing the swell of pulled muscle, numbing the pain that came from the crack of bone resettling into its proper place. It took a few seconds at best, and none of the sickness or pain seemed to want to cling to him like the Scourge had, tainting his magic with shadow. He pulled back, and Luna set her foot down on the grass. 

"Oh," she said. "Oh, no."

"Uh, your highness?" Prompto called. Ravus was trying to push away from the truck, his face pale with effort, and Luna sighed loudly and hitched up her robe. She ran with the gait of someone who hated it, and grabbed Ravus by the face, pushing him up against the hood of the truck.

"Stay still," she said, and pressed her forehead to his. She frowned slightly, and Ravus breathed out, loud and ragged, closing his eyes as the few remaining spots on his skin faded away. Luna pulled back and twisted to look at Noctis.

"Did you do this?" she asked.

"I didn't--I didn't infect him," Noct said. Beside him, the grey and white dog was staring into his eyes, unblinking. He edged away. "I promise."

Luna's gaze softened. "That isn't what I meant," she said. "I'm dreadfully sorry, I'm afraid I forgot myself. Thank you, all of you--I take it you took my brother out of the hands of the empire."

"It was Prompto's idea," Noct said, and Prompto went red, mouth falling open. Luna smiled, and Prompto made a strangled sound. 

"Come here," Luna said to Noct. She held out a hand. He took it, and light formed around their palms, floating over his fingers. She narrowed her eyes. "You don't have the Scourge, at least. You tried to heal him?"

"I... Yes."

"Never do that again," Luna said.

"Hold it." Gladio's cheeks colored when Luna glanced his way. "Noct's the reason your brother's alive right now."

"Yes, and I'm grateful," Luna said, "but there are reasons why someone who isn't an Oracle shouldn't dabble with the Scourge. Please," she added, squeezing Noct's hand.

"I'll make no promises," Noct said. 

"Your highness," Cor said, and Luna started slightly as he bowed, a hand on the hilt of his sword. "Cor Leonis, Marshal of the Crownsguard. I beg your leave to escort you to Lucis, on behalf of the king."

Luna drew herself up, and Noct fell back a step. "I accept," she said. She looked up at the cloudless sky. "But we'd best hurry. There are magitech in the woods, and the empire isn't far behind."

"Alright," Cor said. "Back in the truck, people. Noct, you have enough magic to throw up a shield?"

Noct bit his lower lip as he called on his magic, and was shocked to find it came easily, a shield of light snapping over his arm in the span of a heartbeat. It came from the same source as his healing magic, he realized, looking up at the thick, interlocking panels.

"Good," Cor said. "Stay in the bed of the truck. Ignis, you're at the wheel. Your highness, please ride inside with me and Prompto. Everyone else, in the bed with Noct. We'll need you to jump out if a drop-ship catches us."

"Yes, sir," Gladio and Ignis said. Luna ran to pick up her trident again, gave Cor a long, distant look, and climbed into the back with Ravus. Gladio leaned on the roof to balance them out, feet braced, and Noct grabbed his collar to keep him steady. The dogs stayed outside, tails wagging, and kept pace with the truck as it whirled in a tight circle, speeding off down the grassy lane.


	30. Chapter 30

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which we find out what happens when Clarus leaves Regis alone for half an hour.

The first thing Nyx learned, thirty minutes into his new role of Acting-Captain of the Kingsglaive, was that promotion would probably get him killed.

He walked behind the king, alone on a small, tucked-away stair behind the king's private office, where three DNA locks and a magical wall would have deterred anyone smart enough to notice the crease in the wallpaper where the entrance was. The stair smelled of old stone and water, like one of the tombs in Duscae, and he could feel the groove in the steps where countless people--countless kings and queens--had descended over the centuries.

"Your majesty," Nyx said, struggling not to pull ahead of the king as they strode down the narrow, cold stairway. "When you said you needed a favor, I thought Lord Amicitia would be with u--"

"Clarus would not approve," Regis said. His cane struck each step with the hollow boom of a door slamming shut. "You will speak to no one of what you see here."

There was no command in his voice. Just certainty, cold and absolute. Nyx nearly stumbled on the stair, and placed a hand on the curved wall beside him for balance.

There was a time, when Nyx was young, that he thought he could die for the stern, distant man who wore the crown of Lucis. There were days when his hands shook, locked behind his back, as the king paced the lines of the Glaive. Days when he drew himself up into a man of stone as the king's gaze passed him by. Nights when he dreamed of earning glory on the field, sleeping in a hole in the ground with Libertus sprawled beside him, imagining the king's hand on his shoulder, the heat of his gaze, the low cadence of his voice.

But Nyx knew better, now. The king he once dreamed of was as impossible as the statues of the old wall, as much an illusion as whatever held Drautos together all those years, only to come undone in the street without a word. The man who walked before Nyx was too human for adoration, dangerous as a rapidly retreating tide. Nyx felt as though he were still holding his breath, a thin inhale that hitched with every crack of the cane.

"Ulric," Regis said. A faint light glowed far below them, lines of blue gilding the stone. "Are you a religious man?"

"We have our own gods in Galahd," Nyx said. "Yours are better for cursing, though."

Regis' mouth almost twisted in a smile. "Yes, I imagine they are. Your gods are rather private, aren't they? Not nearly as vain as the astrals."

"We don't speak of them, sir," Nyx said, which was, in a way, both an outlandish lie and something of the truth. Philosophers in Galahd talked themselves sick with debate over the existence of the divine, but if a Nif or a Lucian asked them, they were suddenly more devout than a priest. It was a matter of pride, really. 

"Practical of you." The king shook out his hand, and the magic in the air around him rippled. "We should learn from your example. None of this mess would have happened if we'd left the gods to their own devices. But we had to build them palaces. Monuments. This Citadel is, in many ways, a shrine to Etro. Her touch is in every door and window, every buckle and ring and piece of clothing the royal family has owned since my ancestor turned the founder king back from his throne."

"Sir?" Nyx's own footsteps sounded far too soft. "Sir, did you say--"

"Yet she's the only astral who remains silent. Perhaps there's a lesson there." The king raised a hand as the steps leveled out, approaching a small door carved into the stone. His palm touched the engraving of a skull, and light sank into its sockets, spilling out to trail along the edges of the door. It ground open, and they were both drowned in a brilliant blue light.

"Behold," the king said. "The second greatest of the Lucian gods."

Nyx staggered into the glare and instinctively raised a hand to his earpiece. The line popped and went silent, and Nyx let his hand drop. Just a few feet away, King Regis stood before the legendary crystal of the Lucii, his hands upraised.

"Sir," Nyx said.

"If anything happens to me," Regis said, his skin washed blue in the light of the massive stone floating at his feet, "I ask that you deliver my ring to Princess Lunafreya. She will know what to do."

"Your majesty," Nyx said, pushing into the light. 

The king curled his hands into claws, dragging at the air around the crystal. He staggered back heavily, as though pulling a great weight with him, and Nyx felt something in the magic of the room warp and twist. His gaze locked on the crystal, and it wasn't until Regis took another step back that Nyx could see the shape the light made.

A great dragon's head, faintly metallic and bristling with spikes, slowly formed around the stone, drawn forward by the king's magic. _Bahamut,_ Nyx thought. The ruler of the Lucian gods, the arbiter of divine justice. A nightmare creature, laughed about in bars back home and painted under bridges. A beast.

The god spoke, but Nyx could only hear bits and pieces, echoes of familiar words bouncing back from the low tolling of the Astral's voice. King Regis leaned on his cane, refusing to bow or bend at the knee, and the specter of the god filled the chamber that held the crystal, staring down at Regis through an impassive mask.

The king shouted, and the voice boomed again. Regis' face twisted with a rage that Nyx had only glimpsed before, revealed in an open hand held out before his one-time captain, and he called out over the echoes of the god's retort. His voice was lost in the din, and Nyx reached for his shoulder as Bahamut spread blade-like wings about them, enclosing them in his grasp.

Regis grabbed the ring, which shone with a light nearly as brilliant as the crystal, and Bahamut roared. The light of the crystal pierced through the god, and as it did, it made prisms against the ghostly mythril of the god's form. Images flickered there, scattered and small, and Nyx's vision darted from one to the other, trying to piece them together.

There was one of a man--Noctis, Nyx realized, older and thinner and more careworn, running his hand over the arm of the throne. Another of fingers slipping off the hilt of a sword, another of a woman dead on an altar, dead on a burning field, dead on the end of a trident, dead in a bed of sylleblossoms, Noct's bloodless hand in hers, the woman rising with one wing outspread, her eyes burning with a cold, inhuman fury as Noctis fell before her. A man with dark red hair driving a blade through Noct's stomach. The same man holding him, a hand in his hair, cradling him to his chest. Noctis smiling, face tilted up to the light of the sunrise. A young child on a hill taking Noct's hand.

"What the hell is this?" Nyx shouted, and Bahamut's wings spread wider, trying to block out the light. King Regis smiled grimly, and when Nyx braced him, he sank into the touch, legs trembling. 

"It seems you've been holding back, old friend," he called, and the god's wings flicked out. Streams of light cast across the floor, and Nyx saw himself there, trapped in one of the rays. He had the gold band of a philosopher-king of Galahd woven in his hair, and the ring of the Lucii shone on his hand, bathing him in the light of the crystal. Then Bahamut's wings clicked out of place, and the vision scattered and broke.

Bahamut bunched his hind legs like a bird crouching for flight, and Nyx only had just enough time to build a wall between them before the god took off, sending them both to their knees as he rose through the high ceiling and out of sight.

"Your majesty," Nyx said at last, struggling to form the words through the roaring in his ears. "Excuse me for saying this, but what the _fuck_ did you do?"

King Regis only laughed.

 

\---

 

"Imperials above us!"

The tree line of the new royal forest was only a few yards away when the shadow of a drop ship slid over the truck. Cor slammed on the brakes, and Gladio and Ignis pushed Noct to the bed of the truck as dust rose in great clouds over them, obscuring the bright armor of the MT soldiers that dropped to the road. There were at least twenty, possibly more, and Noct wrenched his sword out of the armiger as Luna adjusted her grip on her trident. 

"Let me go in first," Noct said. "I have the most experience with MTs."

"We'll flank you," Ignis said, and the three of them tumbled out of the truck together. Noct made to throw his sword, but his magic stuttered around him, almost _uncertain,_ so he took off instead, recalling Ardyn's voice calling out from the sidelines; _no-phasing, Noct...._

He barreled into the thick of the MT soldiers with his blade held out before him, filling the air with the sharp screech of metal, and for a moment, he was back in Gralea, launching himself into the thick of one of Ardyn's favorite training exercises. Then Ravus was there, his sword jamming in the neck of an MT soldier to let in the light, then Gladio, holding up a shield over Noct's head as a shower of sparks cascaded over them, then Ignis, palming a spell flask in Noct's hand before ducking into the fray. Noct stepped over the body of a fallen MT and thrust his sword into the workings of an Assassin class soldier, grinning fierce and triumphant.

"Well, well, well," a voice called from above. Noct risked a glance up to find a human soldier on the bay doors, a red cloak shoved hastily down the front of his armor. "If it isn't the chancellor's pet."

"Oh, hell," Noct said. He shoved the Assassin off his blade and shaded his eyes to get a better look. The cloak was enough to give him a good idea who would be foolish enough to grandstand without a weapon nearby, and he sighed, affecting a careless smirk. "Who were you again?"

"Who--" The man sputtered, and Ravus laughed. "Ravus as well? Two meek little princes, all in one--excuse me!" he shouted, as Noct turned his back.

"Alright, guys," Noct said. "Let's pack it up. Nothing more to see here."

"Noctis," Ravus said. "This is Brigadier General Loqi Tum--"

"Never heard of him," Noct lied. "Princess Lunafreya, please stay in the truck. We'll clear out the MTs in no--"

" _Don't turn your back on me!_ " Noct smiled as something thumped in the pile of smoldering MTs, and pretended to turn in alarm, a hand on his chest. Ravus gave him a look, but Noct just stepped closer, face tight with mock concern. When Loqi rose to his feet, Noct's sword was there to block him, wrenching Loqi's blade from his grip.

"Stick to mechs, Loqi," Noct said, as Loqi lunged, yanking a sword from a fallen MT's hand. "Where'd that new model go? The one you spent half your budget working on?"

"You damn well know where it is!" Loqi snarled. Gladio stepped forward, but Noct waved a hand. Loqi was one of the best sources of intel Ardyn had. Just a little goading, the right word here and there, and he'd spill state secrets out of pure spite. He let Loqi take the next two steps, guiding him away from the others. "You and that sick, conniving little weasel you call your father."

"I'd hardly call him little," Noct said. Loqi lunged at him again, and Noct tripped him, bringing Loqi down on his back in the grassy shoulder of the road. Noct gently lay the blade of his sword on Loqi's exposed neck. "But please. Tell me what I've done."

Loqi ground his teeth. "It had to be you," he said. "You're the chancellor's dog, aren't you? And he's the one who set up the quarantine walls. The ones that failed. Half the city's closed off now, and I can't even get to my gear, my _men--_ "

"Closed off how?" Noct asked. "What's this about quarantine?"

Loqi didn't answer, but there was something about the way he held himself, the tense, careful way he twisted his neck, that made Noct pause. Noct used his free hand to pull back Loqi's bangs, and drew away at the sight of the Scourge, shifting purple and grey at the roots of his hair. 

"You had your own reason for chasing down the Oracle," Noct said. "Princess?" He raised his voice, and Lunafreya stepped out from where she was standing under Ravus' arm. "Patient for you, unless you want me to--"

"Please," Lunafreya said. She knelt next to Noct and lay a hand over his. Her power fell through him, and Loqi closed his eyes as the spots faded. It was over in a moment, and Luna didn't seem nearly exhausted as Noct was after a healing, even though she did lean on Noct's shoulder as she stood.

"Loqi," Noct said. "Where's the emperor in all this?"

Loqi gave Noct a wild-eyed look. "You don't know," he said. "You actually don't know."

Noct shook his head. "I've been busy."

"Dead," Loqi said, and Noct heard Luna gasp softly. "Dead of the Scourge, just like half of Gralea. Like all of house Tummelt. Like Niflheim. Everyone except you and your master."

"That's impossible," Noct said.

"The sun didn't rise in Niflheim this morning," Loqi said. He laughed, but it came out hoarse and terrible, a broken-off croak of a dying bird. "It's the end of the world."

 

\---

 

"Tea?" 

Nyx looked balefully across the king's desk, and King Regis raised a brow, set down the electric kettle in his hands, and turned to a glass cabinet behind him.

"I keep this on hand for guests," he said, pulling out a bottle shaped like an eagle, with glass wings that glowed amber as he poured a glass. The bottle itself was probably worth a month's rent. Nyx took the glass from the king, examining his own dirty, calloused fingers sliding over the surface.

"I always thought the crystal was a power source," Nyx said. He took a sip, dimly thought of the five-credit bottle of wine he and Libertus shared in their one-bedroom apartment, and downed the glass. "Like a battery."

"And that's what it is," the king said. "To Insomnia, at least. To the rulers of Lucis, I'd call it... a clock, counting down to the promised day."

A few hours ago, Nyx would have smiled. "The prophecy, you mean. About the king of light."

"Yes." The king poured himself a cup of tea. "Twelve years ago, I went to the crystal for aid in finding Noctis. It gave me a vision. Noctis, the king of light, sitting dead on his throne."

Nyx thought of the image of Noctis standing before the throne and shuddered. "But the other visions. The woman, the child, the one with--" _With me,_ he didn't say. No one had worn the band of a ruler of Galahd in over three hundred years, and so far as he knew, the Ulrics came from farmers on the northern islands. It made no sense.

He tried not to think about some of the other visions.

"When I came to the crystal, I only saw one outcome," Regis said. He refilled Nyx's glass. "Bahamut ensured that. But now that the hour draws close, I wondered what would happen if I were to, ah, remove his influence."

"Fuck," Nyx whispered. 

"My sentiments exactly," said the king. "What I have done is a gamble. The gods will know that I have seen an alternative to their plan, and will seek out Noctis to thwart any attempt to change his fate. What he needs now is power. He needs someone who will not bow to the gods. Someone who knows what it takes to survive. I, unfortunately, do not have the strength to be that person for my son. I know of two who do. One is the Oracle. The other..."

The king slowly drew the ring from his finger, and set it down on the desk with a faint click. The crystal at its core glowed blue, twisting around the black bands that held it, and Nyx's hands tightened on his glass.

"Tell me, Nyx Ulric," King Regis said. "What are you willing to risk to see my son safe through the dawn?"


	31. Chapter 31

Ardyn Lucis Caelum lounged on the imperial throne of Iedolas Aldercapt, one leg draped over the armrest, hat tilted over his face. The only light in the room came from the ceiling, where two liquid eyes blinked and roved along the steel support beams. The daemon's mouth slavered and snarled with a wordless, endless muttering, trying in vain to recreate the feel of human speech on its mutilated tongue, and Ardyn groaned, swinging his legs onto the floor. The daemon skittered into a corner of the ceiling, whimpering low, and Ardyn glared it down.

"Two thousand years, and they make another healer king," he said. His footsteps shook with the weight of a red giant as he crossed the floor of the throne room. "Two thousand years. I should have blotted out the sun when Somnus showed his true colors."

He thought of Noctis, kneeling at Prince Ravus' side, the light of his magic pouring from his hands, and fog rose from the indentations Ardyn's feet made in the steel walkway. He'd played by the gods rules in spirit, if not to the letter. He'd trained Noctis to be a king, hadn't he? He'd made Noctis his. _His,_ and now Shiva, that meddlesome, smiling corpse of a goddess, Shiva had the _gall_ to take him, to turn him--

Ardyn paused. The darkness around him shifted, thick with the Scourge, and the daemons that roamed the pit beneath him howled and spat.

Shiva should not have been there in the first place. Oh, Ardyn had assumed, back when he'd killed her some twenty years before, that he'd miscalculated, that the god-killers of Niflheim had only weakened her. But the goddess who froze Ardyn in the keep had been...different, somehow. Familiar. Her touch was...

Ardyn slowly raised a hand to his lips.

If Shiva were alive, the Scourge would not have stopped her from visiting Ardyn or Noctis before. There was only one goddess whose nature clashed with the Scourge, who was weakened by its very presence, who had the most to lose if the sun never rose.

There was only one goddess who could wear the faces of the dead.

For the second time in a thousand years, fear wrapped a cold hand around Ardyn's heart. He tugged his coat closer round his shoulders and let the comforting miasma of the Scourge follow him through the keep, building a barrier against the world, against the sun, against death itself.

 

\---

 

The ring in Nyx's palm was surprisingly warm to the touch.

"I'll guide you through it," the king said, but Nyx could only think of Noctis, hunched over a picnic table in a dirty robe, smiling at Nyx as though he wasn't sure he was allowed. Noctis climbing through the bathroom window. Standing barefoot in the council room. Dead on the throne.

"No," Nyx said. "No need."

He put on the ring.

 

\---

 

In the ravine south of Gralea, the corpse of Shiva lay unmoving, eyes closed, one hand sprawled over the ruin of an ancient bridge.

 

\---

 

In Tenebrae, a wind picked up in the trees of the royal forest, scattering leaves over the pale blue sky. Loqi panted beneath Noctis, a blade to his throat, unshed tears pricking his eyes, as the empty drop ship roared above them.

Light formed a nimbus around Noctis' hand, and Pryna nudged her head beneath it, her eyes glowing gold. For a moment, Lunafreya Nox Fleuret saw a man standing on a hillside, a child's hand in his, their bodies blocking the glow of the setting sun. The man turned, and he had Noctis' eyes, his smile, the slight hunch of his shoulders. He beckoned to her, and Luna took a step forward.

The vision disappeared, and the last of Noctis Caelum's gods-given magic left with it, bursting around Noct's hand with the light of a thousand distant stars. 

 

\---

 

Bahamut rose to the wall surrounding Insomnia, magic sloughing off his wings to send sparks popping along the iridescent globe. Regis Lucis Caelum's voice still echoed in his ears, thin and weak-- _Then I revoke the gods_ \--while before him, far in the green hills of Tenebrae, the chosen king was being turned from his path. He would have to be corrected. They could not have another Accursed, not with Ifrit dying of the Scourge, not with Shiva dead, with the Titan too lost in mourning to rouse himself to act. They'd have to--

Above him, just before the small disc of the sun, a single wing unfurled. The wing was tawny, feathers long and patterned like a hawk, and the woman who hovered in its shadow had long black hair and a warm, familiar smile.

Her green eyes were open and unblinking.

 _No,_ Bahamut said.

She placed two small hands on Bahamut's face.

_No._

Heavy wings beat the air, frantic and desperate, but centuries of dwelling in the crystal had made Bahamut only half of his true self, and the goddess held him fast, her lips pressed to the cold mythril of his cheek.

_No._

_Shh,_ said the greatest of the Lucian gods, as Bahamut began to slip from her grasp. _Come now, Bahamut. Surely you know I've always been a fool for love._

Bahamut fell, and the whole of Insomnia watched his body arc back over the Citadel, collapsing into a flurry of magic that fell to the earth like drifting snow. Then the woman in the air flickered, still smiling, and disappeared without so much as a flash of light.

 

\---

 

Nyx stood on the lookout point of the Cold Mountain, watching the sun set over a calm sea. Fishing boats dotted the docks, hauling in their nets for the day, while the town below him glimmered with lit windows and open doors, people strolling down he cobbled streets with a slow, satisfied air.

A woman sat on the edge of the lookout. Her long black hair mingled with the lace at her neck, and her gaze scanned the water, her lips curved in a smile.

 _Sit with me,_ she said. Nyx sat carefully, legs dangling over the side. The woman sighed and looked him up and down. _We've met before,_ she said. Nyx frowned, and her body changed, shifting to the shape of a massive coeurl, her fur tinged with violet. Lightning crackled in her eyes, and Nyx shrank back, scraping his hands on the stone.

 _I suppose you could say that I'm the one constant,_ said the goddess of death, the cat that prowled the edges of every fairytale and nursery rhyme of the archipelago. Her tail whipped the air with the crack of thunder. _Tell me, son of Galahd, why you chose to put on my ring._

"Your ring?" Nyx looked down at the ring glowing on his hand. "I thought this belonged to the Lucian kings."

 _Oh, they're around,_ said the goddess. Her front paws kneaded the air. _But the crystal came from my realm. My tear, in fact, shed for the first king of Lucis. Since its creation, it has been collecting death. The lives of every king, every queen, every fallen Glaive, have fueled the crystal in preparation of its greatest purpose. Righting the perversion of death that the Scourge has made._ Her tail cracked again. _Every daemon that walks the earth is a soul that should belong to me. One of my children. I will have them returned to my keeping._

Nyx licked dry lips. "I don't know about that," he said. "I'm just... It isn't right, what's happening to Noct. He shouldn't have to die for this."

 _No,_ the goddess said. _He shouldn't. Noctis Lucis Caelum should die at ninety-six, in his bed at a guest home on this island, with his son holding his hand. But what should and what will happen can change when the gods involve themselves in human affairs. I did so myself long ago, but it was under another's name. It cost us dearly._

Nyx took a breath of salt air. Laughter rose from the town below him, high and faraway.

 _There are few I see as truly beloved, Nyx Ulric,_ the goddess said. She lifted her head, and the woman from the visions in the crystal appeared, her light blonde hair tied up in a braid around her head, a dirty blue robe hanging off her shoulders. She leaned down to lift Noctis off the ground, and he winced, cradling his hand. A spike of pain ran through Nyx's own hand, then, and light spiraled around the ring, sinking into it.

 _You have three days to deliver my ring to them,_ the goddess said. _Three days, three nights. On the morning of the fourth day, if my ring has not passed to one of them, the power it possesses will consume you. Do you understand the price?_

In Nyx's mind, Noct's hands slipped on the hilt of a sword. The woman the goddess called beloved lay dead at his side at an altar. Dying in a field. No longer somber and clear-eyed and beautiful as the image standing before them, but cold and still, cut down before her time.

Nyx nodded. "I understand."

 _Good._ The goddess flashed sharp, vicious teeth, then leapt, mouth open in a snarl.

Nyx fell to the floor of the king's office, hands upraised to ward his face. Before him, the ring of the Lucii shone with a steady blue light, pulsing with power like the beat of a heart.

King Regis rose to his feet, and Nyx rolled to his side, gasping with the force of the magic flowing through his veins. Warm hands pulled at his shoulders, and he was being held to the king's chest, stiff with pain.

"It will pass," the king said. "What did the rulers of Lucis say?"

"I have three days," Nyx said, and slowly unfolded from the floor. Regis stood with him, holding the desk for support. 

"Then I expect you'd best make haste."


	32. Chapter 32

Far down the lane leading to the Tenebraean manor, Loqi Tummelt was nothing more than a small, wretched figure striding between saplings. Having his life saved by his enemy was the last on a long list of indignities, and rather than bear the thought of having to actually thank anyone, Loqi had taken the first opportunity to run. Which would have been fine, in Noct's opinion, if it hadn't been for the storm clouds rolling in the distance, a wall of shadow creeping steadily for Tenebrae.

"It's spreading," Lunafreya said. She leaned against Prompto on the side of the truck, watching the clear skies overhead as though waiting for the first flecks of the Scourge to blacken the sun. "I don't have enough power to stop this."

Noct, sitting with Pryna at his feet in the truck bed, looked up from his hands.

"You think it's in the storm?" Cor asked. "We'll need to call for an evacuation. If enough people can shelter under the wall--"

"It won't be enough," Ignis said. 

"Never thought it'd happen like this," said Prompto.

"Now would be a good time for the king of light to show up," Noct said, in a careful voice. "Don't you think?"

A cool breeze stirred the grass of the lane, kicking up dust. Ravus turned to stare.

"Funny thing about Ardyn," Noct said. "He likes to play with the truth. Used to dress me in royal black just to be ironic, didn't even bother changing my name... And he said something interesting, when I was younger. Something about me being the first true king to appear in two thousand years. Which made sense when I thought I was his son. But I'm not, am I?"

Cor's back was turned, his head bowed. Gladio refused to meet his gaze.

"I'm not a fool, either," Noct said. He sank into his magic. It was clear and cool now, a pure fire untouched by the magic of the gods, strengthened by years of meditation, of training, of being thrown into a regimen no kid should have conceivably endured.  
All those years hadn't just taught Noct control over his magic--It had strengthened the core of him, the magic that the elements had fed off of for generations. No wonder other Caelums had died trying to pull healing magic through the barrier of the gods' blessing. The difference was stark, now that Noct could feel it for himself. It wasn't a finite well anymore. It was like dipping into his soul, or the heart of a sun. It could burn him to ashes if he didn't have control. 

He drew up a handful of it and traced his hand around the truck. Gold ropes sprang from the ground, a spiderweb of magic arching over nearly half a mile of the royal forest, panels of light snapping shut between them as they joined in the center. 

"Ardyn used to be a healer king," Noct said. Ravus' lips parted slightly. Down the lane, Loqi slammed a fist against the wall Noct had made. "The gods changed his magic, and he turned into... This. Whatever he is now. So it makes sense that I'm the one who has to heal him."

For a moment, Luna looked the spitting image of her brother. "Pardon?" 

"The crystal was supposed to heal him, back when he was king," Noct said. "It's been two thousand years. It has to be strong enough now."

"Noctis," Luna said. "Please consider. The Scourge is an infection. It will taint your magic if you give it the chance, and the amount that Ardyn has taken in, what he's become--"

"Yeah, I know," Noct said. "But I know him, your highness. I think he _wants_ it to be over. Between the two of us--"

"I need a moment," Ravus said. "Luna, are you implying that the chancellor of Niflheim is the _Accursed?_ " He looked round at the crowd of faces before him. "Well, that certainly explains the keep full of daemons, but..."

"Sorry, Rav," Noct said. "I'll catch you up later, but yeah. Looks like." He waved his hand, and the dome burst, disappearing in flecks of light. "And I'm the one who knows him the best out of anyone. It has to be me."

"You're not..." Cor cleared his throat, and Noct looked up to find him red-faced and tense at the side of the truck, gaze fixed on his feet. "Not the only one who knows him."

Cor pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes for a moment, as though gathering his strength. "Regis might kill me for this, but... Have any of you heard of the Tempering Grounds?"

 

\---

 

To reach the caverns where a thirteen-year-old Cor Leonis had charged in, terrifying most of his friends and earning himself the name of Immortal, they first had to get another set of tickets at the train station. The station was packed with people, most of them too poor to afford a journey North, and Noct recognized a few faces from the last time they'd departed. He glanced back at the horizon, where only the slightest line of grey was visible, and grabbed Ignis by the arm.

"I need your help," he said. "I want to get these people on the train."

"Noctis, some of them have the Scourge," Ignis whispered. He skirted around a young girl lying on her side, and Noct's hand on his arm tightened. "I'm amazed the trains are being manned at all, given the circumstances."

Noct looked out over the station. They didn't have time. The storm over Niflheim was growing, bringing the Scourge with it, and every second they wasted brought another inch of land under darkness.

The girl at their feet curled up on herself, hands bunched on her stomach. 

"Find a way to convince them," Noct said. He held Ignis' gaze, refusing to look away. "I'm trusting you, Ignis."

He waited until Ignis gave him a short, jerky nod, then released him. Ignis waved over Ravus and Cor, but Noct was already on his knees at the girl's side, a hand on her shoulder.

"Hey," he whispered. "Hey, what hurts?"

The girl opened her eyes. "What?" Her face was dripping with sweat, and her hands clenched, pressing against her stomach.

"It's okay," Noct said. He heard footsteps behind him, and the soft murmur of voices, but he blocked them out as he dipped into his magic. "I'm here to help."

"Are you a doctor?"

"Yeah," Noct said. He let his magic fall into her. "Something like that. What's your name?"

"Olivia."

"That's a pretty name," Noct said. There was a lump of sickness in her stomach. The Scourge had rooted itself there, digging into the growth that shrank at the touch of Noct's magic, and Noct carefully made sure no particles escaped to taint her blood. "Do you know about Olivia the Just? She was a knight of Niflheim three hundred years ago. They say she killed a dragon and rescued the emperor's son."

"I have a book about her," Olivia whispered. Her hand clutched Noct's arm tight, digging into his skin.

"I bet she'd be proud of you," Noct said. "You got out of Niflheim all on your own. That's more than enough bravery for a dragon, don't you think?"

"I was scared the whole time, though." The growth was almost gone, but Noct had to be careful--he wasn't sure what would happen if he applied too much magic. He summoned a wall of power, a bubble that slowly shrank until there was nothing left but light.

"I dunno, I'd be scared, too," Noct said. He drew back, taking the girl's hands in his. She sat up slowly. "Can you keep a secret, Lady Olivia?"

The girl smiled a little at that. "Think so."

"My name's Noctis. Noctis Lucis Caelum." Olivia squeaked, holding his hands tight. "And I'll need someone with your kind of bravery to help me out."

"I thought you were dead!" she managed to say, in a high, small voice. "The radio said so."

Noct smiled and winked. "It's a secret for now."

"I won't tell anyone," Olivia said. "I swear."

"Thank you," Noct said. He released her hands, and she held them to her chest. "I need someone to find all the people who are on their own, all the kids who look too sick to move or don't have parents around, and to bring me to them. Can you do that for me?"

"Yes," Olivia breathed. "Yes, your highness."

"Noct," Noct said. She flushed pink and nodded, then scrambled to her feet.

"Thank you," she said, still in that high, breathless voice. "I'll do my best."

"I know you will," Noct said, and she went running off, hitching her thick woolen dress up at her knees. 

"You have a disciple," said a voice behind him. Noct looked up over his shoulder at Luna, who stood with her arms crossed, wearing one of Cor's lumpy sweaters over her ragged dress. One of her dogs, the grey one, sat primly at her side, watching Noct with a critical eye.

"I don't know about that," Noct said. Luna smiled. "I know how you feel about my magic, but I can't just leave people in pain like that."

Luna pressed her lips together in a tight line. "I'm simply worried, Noctis. But if you don't mind, I thought I might join you. I'd like to see how you work, and, well... They're my people, too. I can't leave them any more than you can."

"Um! Um, sir!" Olivia came racing back, boots slapping the wood of the platform. "I got a whole bunch of kids together in the back. No one wants to go near them, because, um. They have the Scourge," she said.

"That's okay," Noct said. "Doctor Luna and I'll see to them, right?"

"Of course," Luna said, straight-faced. "Lead the way, Lady Olivia."

They found the children near an abandoned concessions stand. What they saw there was a disaster. Fevers and sprained wrists, infections and headaches, and everywhere, the insidious shadow of the Scourge. They weren't a family, but rather a group of kids led by teenagers, who all happened to find each other as they fled the outskirts of Niflheim.

Noct treated the worst of their physical wounds as Luna charmed her way through them, letting her magic slip out with a casual touch on the shoulder, a bump of her foot, the brush of a hand on someone's sleeve. They left with promises to see them on the train later, and Noct nudged Luna's shoulder as they followed Olivia to another shadowy corner of the station.

"Nicely done, Doctor Nox Fleuret."

"Why thank you, Doctor Caelum," Luna said. They stood there a moment, just smiling at each other, before Noct turned away, rubbing the back of his neck.

He was starting to sway by the time Ignis and Prompto ran up to them, letting them know that Ignis and Cor had brokered a deal with the train engineers. Noct gratefully took Ignis' arm, and waved to Olivia, who was standing with the first group of kids and teens, beaming proudly.

"What do you think?" Noct asked Luna, as they joined the crowd of people pushing their way into the train. "Do we stand a chance?"

Luna gave him a strange, unreadable look. "With a little luck," she said, "We just might."

There weren't any cabins available by the time they got aboard, so they huddled together in the dining car. Luna made Noct sit down in a booth as she and Prompto went off to seek out more people with signs of the Scourge, and Noct ate two disgusting trays of half-warm food before he even realized they'd been set down in front of him. Cor spent most of the time on the phone, and Gladio stayed next to Noct, keeping his body between him and the endless crowd of meandering people.

Now and then, though, a few younger refugees would stop by the booth, stare at Noct, grin, and run off again. After the third time, Gladio burst out laughing, and Ravus had to hide his face. 

"What?" Noct asked. "What'd they say?"

"They said _He is handsome!_ " Ravus said, and covered his mouth with a hand. 

"You have a fanclub, it seems," Ignis said, and Noct dropped his face into his arms as a group of girls staggered by, whispering. 

When they got off at the stop closest to the Tempering Grounds, a whole slew of kids ranging from twelve to twenty tried to shove themselves halfway out the windows.

"Your highness!" one of them shouted.

"It's the prince!" another cried.

"I'm sorry!" piped a small voice. "I swear I didn't tell!"

Noct waved, and a shout rose up from the train as it wheeled away, puffing towards Lucis. "Oh my gods," he whispered.

"Well, at least you know you'll do well in the polls as king," Ignis said.

"Please," Noct said. "Don't."

Cor only muttered darkly, glaring into the downward slope that led to a dark, jagged ravine. Noct raced to catch up, cheeks burning, and saw that Cor's ears were tinged with pink.

"Doing okay?" Noct asked. Cor shrugged.

"It's been nearly thirty years," he said. "I... made a few mistakes here, when I was young."

"And you met someone who knows Ardyn," Noct said. "How?"

"Hard to explain." Cor gripped the hilt of his sword. Noct's hand went to the sword hanging on his own belt, an unfamiliar weight at his side, and nearly slipped a few feet down the path. Cor held him fast, and didn't let go after he found his footing, one hand on Noct's elbow. "You'll have to see him for yourself. If he'll let you."

The ravine was beautiful in the light of late afternoon. Stalagmites made of crystal jutted out from the cliff walls, making broken arches over the pit beneath them, and hawks wheeled in the warm breeze. They stopped before a cave mouth lined with geodes, and Cor pulled Noct back a step, watching the darkness carefully.

"Everyone who can't fight," Cor said, in a tense voice, "needs to stay outside."

"Oh, man, really," Prompto whispered. Luna smiled and kissed his temple, and Cor, Gladio, Ignis, and Noctis stepped through the mouth of the cave.

"Holy shit," Noct said. Bodies lay impaled on the wall, armor held together by yellowed bone and fraying leather, swords thrust hilt-deep in the stone. Noct saw armor from Niflheim, from Lucis, even a set of ancient Tenebraean plate armor. He looked at Cor, whose face was as shadowed and grim as the walls of the cave.

"Cor," he said. "You were thirteen when you came here?"

"Wait," Ignis said. "Someone's speaking."

A low whisper ran over them, low and faint as the howl of the breeze. Noct stepped forward, shaking off Cor's hand, and tried to focus in the dark.

"It's Solheim," he said. He spoke in the same language, voice echoing off the walls. "Speak up. What are you? A daemon?"

Mist rose a few yards away, coalescing into an indistinct form that towered over Noct. Cor cursed. 

"Who comes, speaking the old tongue?"

"I am the light of the night sky," Noct said. "Son of the king of the same name. But you could say that my other father's name is Ardyn."

The figure in the mist seemed to go still for a moment. Then they burst from the fog, a tall, white-haired person with a silver mask Noct had seen before, when he was young and alive and following Ardyn through a city street. He only had one arm, the stump of his left shoulder wrapped with cloth, and when he came into the light, Cor hissed out a short breath.

"Gilgamesh?" Noct said.

Behind him, Gladio and Cor drew their swords, and dots of light cast over the floor from the surface of Ignis' knives. Gilgamesh lifted one gauntleted hand and pulled his mask loose, revealing a dark and attractive face, with thick raised scars over his eyes and nose.

"You speak like him," he said, and dropped to one knee. "You have his voice."

Noct took another step. Even kneeling, Gilgamesh was tall enough that Noct hardly had to stoop to touch him. He laid a hand on his shoulder, and was surprised to find a firm weight there, and warmth beneath the skin. 

Gilgamesh frowned. "I can see the light in you. You're as powerful as he was, but there is no shadow. No sign of the gods."

"He stole me," Noct said. "It backfired. I'm trying to heal him now--If you know anything that can help--"

"Heal?" Gilgamesh recoiled as though struck. "Nothing can heal him. The gods have decreed that the only mercy he can be given is death, death at the hands of the last king of Lucis..."

"The gods were wrong before," Noct said. "And I'm not the last."

Gilgamesh stood and gripped Noct's chin, twisting his face to the side. "You _are_ his son," he said. "Or what his son should have been. This task is foolish. What wears Ardyn's face now is not the man he was. There is nothing left to heal." 

"What if you're wrong?" Noct asked.

"You'll have to prove that to me, little king," Gilgamesh said, releasing him. A scarlet katana appeared in his hand, long and bright with spectral flame. "If you have the strength."


	33. Chapter 33

Once, long before he and Ardyn moved to Gralea, Noct had watched Ardyn take down a squad of MTs barehanded. It was a lazy afternoon, unnaturally hot for Niflheim, and Noct was using Ardyn's jacket as a makeshift sunshade while Ardyn stood in the middle of the training yard, examining his cuffs. The MTs approaching him were assassin-models, and they moved like beasts, feral and single-minded. Still, Ardyn didn't summon his sword. He stood there until the first MT came within arm's reach, then he made an odd movement with the back of his left hand against the flat of the blade, broke the metal fingers of the MT with his right, and Noct covered his face as the MT screamed its death throes on the end of its own blade.

That night, Ardyn taught Noct the same move using a ruler, safe in their small rooms in the keep. It would be almost six years before Noct learned to pull it off properly.

Now, standing within a foot of Gilgamesh, Noct didn't bother to reach for his sword. He took Gilgamesh's hand instead, pushing out with his magic until a thin barrier rose up from his fingers, prying Gilgamesh's sword loose. 

"We aren't doing this," he said. He felt something shift under his hand, shying away from Noct's magic--the Scourge, so thick in Gilgamesh's blood that Noct felt dizzy with it, pulsing against his skin. Noct grabbed at Gilgamesh's face, the only exposed skin he could touch, and light rose to his fingers.

A scream shook the cavern, low and anguished, reverberating off the carved-out walls and rattling in Noct's ears. There was so _much_ of it, so much of the Scourge, pushing against Noct's magic like a tide against a pier, and Noct didn't realize it was his own voice breaking the silence of the cavern until he felt the black tendrils of the Scourge hook into him, racing through his hands, darkening his veins, filling his mind with a terror and rage that swamped his thoughts. He was drowning, truly drowning, latched onto Gilgamesh and furious and sick and lonely and gods, gods, he'd killed so many poor souls he wasn't sure if he was even himself anymore, if he wasn't just a trapped spirit run by plague and magic and the memory of a man who had seen the man he loved dragged into the dark in chains. He'd done the right thing, surely, by holding back the time of Etro's coming, by staving off death as long as possible, by tying himself to Ardyn. He was his shield, after all (no, his sword. He'd promised to be his sword, hadn't he?), and what good was a shield who left a job half-done? 

It was a gamble to come to Ardyn after his exile. A gamble to hope that the madness that came after Somnus' betrayal could lift just enough for Ardyn to tell him no, to laugh the way he used to when Gilgamesh came up with some new fool idea, but Ardyn had only snarled out curses and tugged against his bonds, had called him a traitor and a mercenary, a false friend, a whore to that thief on the throne. 

Gilgamesh hadn't cried for him, then. He'd kissed the black tears that trailed down Ardyn's cheeks, there in the dark of Ardyn's tomb. But did weep later, when the goddess came to him and revealed her true face, and Gilgamesh, his tongue bitter with the Scourge and his muscles locked in pain, begged for a favor.

He'd been alone for so long.

"No," Noct was saying. No, Gilgamesh. No. No, he was, he was breathing for the first time in nearly two thousand years, taking great gasps of air, and there was Ardyn at his feet, dark-haired and blue-eyed but Ardyn, and he was dying of the Scourge. Gilgamesh had warned him not to take in too much at once, but the damn fool never listened. There was a reason he needed to rest between healings, a reason the gods had to bolster his strength. If he--

No, he--

Noct coughed blood on the stone, but the blood was black as oil and far too thick, spattering on his hands.

Gilgamesh took the so-called son of his king in his arms and felt the rapid thrumming of a heart about to burst. 

"Leave him alone!"

Noct struggled to push through the pain of thousands of years of fury and fear and despair, and he squinted up into the eyes of a man he knew, gazing down from his own--from _Gilgamesh's_ face.

"Noct?"

Then there was light, and the touch of a hand on Noct's head, and Noct dragged his fingers into Gilgamesh's thick white hair and screamed as the light swept away the riotous din of the Scourge.

Luna tugged at Noct's shoulder, and he fell back, kneeling on the broken stone of the cavern with the shadow of the Scourge flaking away on his cheeks. He was himself again, wholly himself, but he could still feel the weight of Gilgamesh's centuries of isolation on his chest, and he covered his eyes with a hand and tried not to let the tears show.

"It's alright," Luna said. She was using Noct's shoulders to balance herself, and Noct heard her feet slip at his back. "Wash it out."

A large hand touched Noct's cheek, pushing his palm away from his eyes, and Noct looked up at Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh was younger, no older than Cor at least, and his skin was more brown than ashen, his hair less brittle. He was on his knees in front of Noct, and he was breathing hard, deliberately, as though he'd forgotten how.

"The Caelums are madmen," he said, and Noct shrugged a shoulder.

"You're the one--" Noct winced. His throat was scraped raw with screaming. "The one who ate the Scourge."

"Uh, guys?" Prompto called, his voice coming from a far distance. "Translation?"

"So?" Noct asked, still in old Solheim. "What do you think? Is there something left to heal?"

"Overconfidence won't stop your heart from bursting," Gilgamesh said. "You're worse than he is."

"So are you," Noct said, and, with nothing more than a hand on Gilgamesh's chest to brace himself, hunched over and heaved everything he'd eaten in the past day all over the cave floor.

 

\---

 

Nyx was pretty sure he was going in the right direction. It was a good day for a drive, all things considered, and if it weren't for the fact that he was being stalked by a half-real Coeurl out of the corner of his eye and his heartbeat felt like a hammer in his chest, he almost would have enjoyed it.

Beside him, the goddess of death loped through the desert, her tail swishing up dust. She was a beautiful creature--all coeurls were, that's why they were the patrons of the philosopher-kings in the first place--all lean muscle and sharp teeth, lightning snapping with the crack of her whiskers. Nyx flexed his hand and swallowed painfully, and looked up to find Noctis dying in the middle of the road.

His bike tires screamed on the asphalt, and as Nyx tumbled off, the ring on his hand tightened, light streaming over the street.

The goddess of death paced around Noct's hunched form, eyes bright with hunger. Nyx didn't stop to think why Noct would be alone so close to Insomnia, didn't stop to think at all, really, just staggered towards him and wrenched off his helmet.

"Leave him alone," he hissed, when the goddess padded closer. "Noct?"

Noct looked up into Nyx's eyes, recognition making way through a haze of pain, and Nyx reached for his arm. His hand fell through him, and Noct fell away, collapsing into dust in his hands.

"The fuck was that?" he asked the goddess. She blinked, and he recalled the old stories, the ones where the goddess of death would leap without warning, striking down those who questioned her rule. He forced himself not to look away.

"He was on the brink of my kingdom," she said. "The brink, my child. One side, and he's mine. The other, and he will go the way of my other sweet boy, who even now builds a barrier against me. You called him back." She dug her claws in the street, making shallow grooves. "Good."

Nyx stood, running a hand through his hair. "What's happening to him?" he asked. He buckled on his helmet and strode for his bike, which had toppled to the side. "Why was he dying?"

"People die for many reasons," the goddess said. "Usually, because they're no longer alive."

"Oh, fucking helpful," Nyx said, and started the ignition. "The old kings were right about all of you."

"Most likely," the goddess said. She took off running as Nyx righted himself, driving towards the green hills of Duscae. "I like you, child of Galahd. You know me too well to admit to being afraid."

"So no chance of leaving me alone, then?" Nyx muttered, under the roar of the bike engine. The goddess bared her teeth.

"Oh no," she said. "I can't leave _you._ You will deliver the light to my beloved, after all. And in three days, you may well be mine." She laughed, lightning running over her fur like sunlight on the water. "If it happens, I will want to be there to collect. It's the least I can do for such a willing servant."

Nyx cursed under his breath and stared straight ahead, trying to ignore the way his skin cracked with heat and his veins burned with magic. He wondered if this was something all the kings of Lucis had to deal with, or if he was the only one who had persistent goddesses on his tail, waiting for him to die.

"When this is done," Nyx said, "I'm gonna retire, and the kings of Lucis can all go fuck themselves."

The goddess raced ahead, her powerful paws shaking the earth. "When this is done," she called, "and if you aren't careful, there may be no kings of Lucis left."


	34. Chapter 34

Sleep was a luxury no one could afford, not with a storm billowing on the border as they emerged from the cave, Gilgamesh at their heels. Cor held a haphazard sort of council by the side of the road, assigning a rotating schedule of drivers and guards, while Gilgamesh stood a ways off, watching them. After a few minutes, he approached Noct, who was still unsteady on his feet, and nodded towards the darkening horizon.

"Come," Gilgamesh said, and there was no unearthly resonance to his voice, no echo of ghosts trapped by the rising power of the Scourge. "I am in need of a vigil."

"A what?" Noct asked.

"For my death," Gilgamesh said. He turned to go, footsteps silent on the broken soil. Noct rose to follow, walking slow so as not to disturb the rocks that shifted and slid underfoot.

Gilgamesh stopped just at the edge of the road and sat down. He didn't look much like a dying man. Up close, his barrel chest and broad shoulders made him look more like Clarus, the toned muscles of his youth softened, neck bowed. It was almost comforting, which surprised Noct. He couldn't place the moment someone like Gilgamesh would be more of a relief than a threat, and he wasn't entirely sure he liked the change.

"I thought I healed you," Noct said, in Old Solheim. Gilgamesh looked at him out of the corner of his eye, and Noct raised a hand to his shoulder, probing with his magic. He felt normal. Maybe his knees were a wreck, sure, his missing arm ached with phantom pains, and he had an old break in his foot that hadn't healed right, but otherwise, there was no sign of sickness.

"I had a vision when your magic touched me," Gilgamesh said. "I was on the hill overlooking the sunrise. Death was there, and Ardyn. Not yours. Mine." 

Noct let his hand drop.

"That sunrise, though." Gilgamesh sighed, his massive shoulders rising. "Used to never be sunrises, before Ardyn. He was smug about it, of course. _Look what I made today, Gil!_ " A smile creased his scarred face. "I wish you could have met him."

Noct sat there for a minute, arms wrapped around his knees.

"So do I," he said.

"You look something like his brother," Gilgamesh said. "It must gall him to know what you are. I expect it would have been easier to hurt you if you weren't so much like Ardyn, instead. Don't give me that look, boy; I mean my Ardyn. The healer." 

Violet light crackled in the thunderheads crawling over Tenebrae. "You said you need a vigil," Noct said.

"Yes. The Shields of Solheim used to have a holy one keep watch the night before a battle. If they died in the morning, they would find peace with Etro, and not be bound to the fields." Gilgamesh stared into the storm, as though trying to seek out Ardyn among the flashes of light and whirling black swarms of the Scourge. "I would not like to be bound again."

"No one says you have to die," Noct said. "You can't just decide--"

"You must bring Ardyn to your crystal, if you seek to heal him," Gilgamesh said. "For that, you need time. I can give you some."

"I'm not much of a holy one," Noct said, desperately. 

"Perhaps not. A holy one would be silent. But the world has changed. Chosen kings become healers. Healers become accursed. Children challenge me to death by combat." He frowned at that. "But I can have this. A vigil. Tonight, keep your eyes open for me."

Noct scuffed his feet in the sand. Behind them, the council was breaking up, whispers rising, car doors slamming open. 

"Seek the gods," Gilgamesh said. "If you want to turn the storm, you will need their aid. And you will need to focus Ardyn's anger. Right now, it is formless. You must draw his rage to you, or the world will suffer in your stead. Make it personal." 

He looked Noct up and down, thoughtful, then unbuckled his cloak. The outside was crimson, but the inner lining was a brilliant white, with gold and red embroidery along the hem.

"The cloak of the healer king," Gilgamesh said, handing it over. Noct's fingers curled in the worn fabric. "Let it be seen, and he will come."

Noct held his breath. Ardyn had worn this, once. The Ardyn in the visions, the one who only flickered in the face of the man Noct knew. Noct stood and pinned it around his neck, and the white folds hung at his feet, pooling on the ground. 

He laughed, startled by the bark of his own voice.

"Well," Gilgamesh said, with a pained smile. "I always said Ardyn was a giant."

 

\---

 

Nyx stopped for the night at a haven full of ghosts.

They shimmered in the light of his fire, half real and drifting in the wind, drawn to the ring on his finger like birds over a battlefield. They circled him, every now and then letting a foot or an arm or a bit of cloth slip into view, and Nyx cradled his aching arm and listened to their voices murmuring in his ear.

Death lay by the fire, watching Nyx through slitted eyes.

"Can't let the Niffs gain ground," one of the ghosts said. "I can extend the wall if I must."

"Grandfather warned us," said another. "Never have two Caelums in one family. I should have known."

"Is he safe?" This voice was closer, louder than the others. Nyx flinched at the sight of two hands emerging from the empty air, seeking his. He slowly raised a hand, and the ghostly fingers slipped through his palm.

"Is he safe?" the ghost asked again. A woman's voice, low and insistent. "They placed him in my arms before we left for Tenebrae, but I was already cold. I couldn't feel him."

"Do you know his name?" Nyx whispered. 

"Noctis," the woman said, but her voice was fading. "I was already cold."

Nyx held his arm to his chest and glared at the goddess. "How do the Kings of Lucis not lose it with this going on?" he asked.

"They don't see what you see," the goddess said. She rolled on her back, paws in the air. "Death takes them, in the end, but you've walked with me all your life. Think of all the little deaths you've seen. The library burning in Galahd. The rebels in your unit. Your--"

"I'd rather not," Nyx said, and strode through ghosts, making a beeline towards his small tent. 

"You're afraid," the goddess said. "I understand. You think you'll see her if you look close enough."

Nyx froze. He closed his eyes, forcing himself to breathe slowly, evenly.

"Your sister--" the goddess began.

Nyx climbed into the tent. He zipped it up, a flimsy barrier against the spirits that walked through stone and canvas alike, and lay with his arm pressed to his chest until dawn came, thin and weak and far too late.

 

\---

 

Gilgamesh stood on the overgrown road out of Tenebrae, his hand on the hilt of his sword.

The creature wearing his lover's face halted. The storm raged above them, growling and muttering like a den of beasts, and great winged daemons wove in and out of the thunderheads, trailing the tainted magic of the Scourge.

"Why, Gil," Ardyn said, in the common tongue. "There's so much less of you than there was before."

"I said farewell to what was left of you on the road," Gilgamesh said. 

Ardyn's lips curled in a silent snarl, and his gaze slid over Gilgamesh's bare shoulders, the scraps of a scarf around his neck, the worn leather of his uniform. "I see you've discarded me entirely, old friend."

"Never," Gilgamesh said. The clouds above Ardyn were already gathering to a point, drawing in on themselves, magic sinking into his skin as the Scourge darkened his eyes and dripped from his mouth. "To think, the lamb raised to slaughter becomes a healer, instead. How the world turns."

"He isn't..." Ardyn's face spasmed, the Scourge flickering, his eyes going gold and grey and gold again. 

"You fear for him." Gilgamesh said, and Ardyn's face settled at last, twisted in a rictus of fury. Gilgamesh smiled, and in his mind, he could already see the hill, the sunrise, a warm hand beckoning him into the light. 

"You shouldn't," Gilgamesh said, and raised his sword as Ardyn's scythe flashed in his hands, trailing an arc of violet light through the air. "He will be the one to deliver us."

 

\---

 

Thunder rolled. In the back of the truck, Noctis kept his eyes open, watching the storm twist into an arrow, a funnel sliding down to a pinprick on the horizon. His new cloak flapped in the breeze, and Noct tugged it close to his chest, a talisman against the encroaching dark.

 

\---

 

Nyx's arm burned. His bike roared down the long road towards Tenebrae, and just as the pain became almost too much, when the ring seemed to grind his bones and the ghosts that crowded the roadside wailed in a chorus of broken tongues, the goddess running before him disappeared. The road was empty. Fire still seared his veins, but for just a moment, Nyx was alone.

"Noct," he whispered, and picked up speed. She was coming for Noct.

 

\---

 

Gilgamesh shed his armor on the bottom of the hill, where the ferns swayed, thick and vibrant. With each clasp undone, every plate and scale that slithered to the ground, weight fell from Gilgamesh like water sloughing off a roof, lost in the grass. Gilgamesh raised a hand to his eyes--The scars on his face were gone, worn smooth, and his hands were smaller, no longer rough with the callouses of a Shield. He looked up at the woman standing on the crest of the hill and laughed.

She smiled back. "Come," she said. 

"Not yet." Gil wasn't surprised by his harsh, high voice, nor the way his discarded armor seemed far too large for his skinny legs and fragile frame. He turned back, looking into the grey distance from whence he came, and called out to the indistinct figure walking into the mist.

"There's a world waiting for you here, Gilgamesh," the woman said. 

Gilgamesh sat in the ferns, which tickled his face as they fanned in the breeze. "That's fine," he said. "It can wait a little longer."


End file.
